I'm constantly comparing the activities of writing and coding, and one of the things I've realized is that what makes writing so difficult is that you don't have any easy way to tell if it's getting better. In software we've got tests and, of course, the fact that it either works or doesn't. With prose the whole thing is very nebulous. I can spend a couple many-hours-long sessions working on paragraphs that at a high level just don't belong.(17 may 2012)
Start from the assumption that many restaurants go out of business, meaning that failed ones are censored from the remaining pool of available restaurants. Now assume that the two main things that let restaurants succeed are food quality and various other things that we can collectively call atmosphere. The logic of conditioning on a collider implies that among surviving restaurants there should be a negative correlation between atmosphere and food. This implies that if you are monomaniacally focused on good food you should follow the heuristic of avoiding fashionistas and seeking out unpopular ethnic groups as the only way such places could possibly stay in business is if they offer good food. (When Correlation Is Not Causation, But Something Much More Screwy - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic)(14 may 2012)
Eratosthenes (276-195 BCE), the head of the famous Library of Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt, made ground-breaking contributions to mathematics, astronomy, geography, and history. He also argued against dividing humankind into Greeks and ‘Barbarians’. What he is remembered for however is having provided the first correct measurement of the circumference of the Earth (a story well told in Nicholas Nicastro’s recent book, Circumference). How did he do it?
Eratosthenes had heard that, every year, on a single day at noon, the Sun shone directly to the bottom of an open well in the town of Syene (now Aswan). This meant that the Sun was then at the zenith. For that, Syene had to be on the Tropic of Cancer and the day had to be the Summer solstice (our June 21). He knew how long it took caravans to travel from Alexandria to Syene and, on that basis, estimated the distance between the two cities to be 5014 stades. He assumed that Syene was due south on the same meridian as Alexandria. Actually, in this he was slightly mistaken—Syene is somewhat to the east of Alexandria—, and also in assuming that Syene was right on the Tropic; but, serendipitously, the effect of these two mistakes cancelled one another. He understood that the Sun was far enough to treat as parallel its rays that reach the Earth. When the Sun was at the zenith in Syene, it had to be south of the zenith in the more northern Alexandria. By how much? He measured the length of the shadow cast by an obelisk located in front of the Library (says the story—or cast by some other, more convenient vertical object), and, even without trigonometry that had yet to be developed, he could determine that the Sun was at an angle of 7.2 degrees south of the zenith. That very angle, he understood, measured the curvature of the Earth between Alexandria and Syene (see the figure). Since 7.2 degrees is a fiftieth of 360 degrees, Eratosthenes could then, by multiplying the distance between Alexandria and Syene by 50, calculate the circumference of the Earth. The result, 252,000 stades, is 1% shy of the modern measurement of 40,008km.
Crick did not, in my opinion, succeed in solving consciousness (whatever that might mean). Nonetheless, I believe he was headed in the right direction. He had been richly rewarded earlier in his career for grasping the analogy between biological complementarities, the notion that the structural logic of the molecule dictates the functional logic of heredity. Given his phenomenal success using the strategy of structure-function analogy, it is hardly surprising that he imported the same style of thinking to study consciousness. He and his colleague Christoff Koch did so by focusing on a relatively obscure structure called the claustrum.
The claustrum is a thin sheet of cells underlying the insular cortex of the brain, one on each hemisphere. It is histologically more homogeneous than most brain structures, and intriguingly, unlike most brain structures (which send and receive signals to and from a small subset of other structures), the claustrum is reciprocally connected with almost every cortical region. The structural and functional streamlining might ensure that, when waves of information come through the claustrum, its neurons will be exquisitely sensitive to the timing of the inputs.
What does this have to do with consciousness? Instead of focusing on pedantic philosophical issues, Crick and Koch began with their naïve intuitions. “Consciousness” has many attributes—continuity in time, a sense of agency or free will, recursiveness or “self-awareness,” etc. But one attribute that stands out is subjective unity: you experience all your diverse sense impressions, thoughts, willed actions and memories as being a unity—not jittery or fragmented. This attribute of consciousness, with the accompanying sense of the immediate “present” or “here and now,” is so obvious that we don’t usually think about it; we regard it as axiomatic.
So a central feature of consciousness is its unity—and here is a brain structure that sends and receives signals to and from practically all other brain structures, including the right parietal (involved in polysensory convergence and embodiment) and anterior cingulate (involved in the experience of “free will”). Thus the claustrum seems to unify everything anatomically, and consciousness does so mentally. Crick and Koch recognized that this may not be a coincidence: the claustrum may be central to consciousness; indeed it may embody the idea of the ” Cartesian theater” that’s taboo among philosophers—or is at least the conductor of the orchestra. This is this kind of childlike reasoning that often leads to great discoveries. Obviously, such analogies don’t replace rigorous science, but they’re a good place to start. Crick and Koch may be right or wrong, but their idea is elegant. If they’re right, they’ve paved the way to solving one of the great mysteries of biology. Even if they’re wrong, students entering the field would do well to emulate their style. Crick has been right too often to ignore.
I visited him at his home in La Jolla in July of 2004. He saw me to the door as I was leaving and as we parted, gave me a sly, conspiratorial wink: “I think it’s the claustrum, Rama; it’s where the secret is.” A week later he passed away.
other classic is Cortés’s decision to burn his ships upon arriving in South America, thus removing retreat as one of the options his crew could consider.
the paradox of my working days is that in the moment, I'm tempted, always, to coast it out, but in the coasting I doom myself: I end up watching the clock, resenting my time there. Whereas if I do the dreaded — engage — the day cruises and my satisfaction spikes.(07 may 2012)
Be more comfortable with agnostic, and I mean this about the things that make you feel good. It’s so easy to pick a few areas you’re agnostic in, and then feel good about like, “I’m agnostic about religion, or politics.” It’s a kind of portfolio move you make to be more dogmatic elsewhere, right? Sometimes, the most intellectually trustworthy people are the ones who pick one area, and they’re totally dogmatic in that. So pig-headedly unreasonable you think, “How can they possibly believe that!?” But it soaks up their stubbornness, and then on other things, they can be pretty open-minded. So don’t fall into the trap of thinking because you’re agnostic on somethings, that you’re being fundamentally reasonable about your self-deception and your stories and your open-mindedness.
This idea of hovering, of epistemological hovering, and messiness, and incompleteness, and not everything ties up into a neat bow, and you’re really not on a journey here. You’re here for some messy reason or reasons, and maybe you don’t know what it is, and maybe I don’t know what it is, but anyway I’m happy to be invited, and thank you all for listening.
almost as an exercise in empathy, I would like to tell a rather fucked-up story, but from two perspectives, not in the Rashomon style, where each narration distorts the facts, leaves out information, etc., but straightforwardly, except at each turn empathizing deeply with one or the other players(06 may 2012)
"…these models held the high ground…" (nice phrase)(04 may 2012)
"…the fascinating generalization that similarity-based memory access is a stupider, more surface driven, less structurally sensitive process than analogical mapping"(04 may 2012)
"A well-studied example of gain control is the invariance of perceptual sensitivity to the features of the visual world over an enormous range of lighting conditions."(04 may 2012)
"…this doctrine of elementism, its spreading influence, and its corrupt reductionist account of perceptual experience…"(04 may 2012)
the 3-second switching period between CU-BA and BA-CU in CUBACUBACUBACUBA…, or between two ways of seeing a Necker cube, because in effect every three seconds your brain is asking, "What's new?" (From the 'Time in the Mind' entry in the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences)(03 may 2012)
To this day he never approaches a woman like, Oh my God, look how hot she is, I wanna fuck her. Instead he deals with her first as a bona fide person. Then, you know, he waits for the signs to move forward.
"You know they're saying that population growth is at the point where in thirty-five years there are finally going to be more people than things."(01 may 2012)
friendliness involves saying things first(01 may 2012)
I’m noticing that a lot of the expectations / requirements are a lot lower. Most are “up to 2 years” experience.
Last time I was job hunting, everything was asking for 5+ years experience in one software stack and multiple frameworks. Sometimes 5+ years in multiple fields. What changed?
With 100 pounds of stolen HEU split between a couple of knapsacks, and a healthy head start on Russian security forces, you would not have to worry much about getting caught by Americans. The United States claims to be building a layered defense, but the only layer that amounts to much is the NNSA’s securing of stockpiles—and you have just penetrated it with the help of workers on the site. At this point the American defenses fall spectacularly apart. The reasons are ultimately institutional and complex, but initially may be as simple as confusion created by the expanding geometry of choices for anyone carrying stolen HEU toward an assembly point for a bomb. Will you go left or right? The roads keep forking, and you will often turn one way or the other for no more discernible reason than the fact that forward motion requires the choice. American officials who would try to stop you face an infinite braid that becomes the measure of a hostile, corrupt, and anarchic world.
alex, on an artist going to comiccon. "middle america, zipper up, I'm going to try."(27 apr 2012)
“That said, I couldn’t possibly write the show without that room full of people. I go in there, and we kick around ideas. I’m writing about all kinds of things I don’t know anything about. So they do research for me.” Argument ensues. And, for Sorkin, happiness. “I come from a family of lawyers, all smarter than I am,” he said. “I grew up really enjoying the sound of intelligence and the sound of a great argument, and wanting to imitate that sound.” (Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom: Sneak Peek at the New HBO Show | Hollywood | Vanity Fair)(26 apr 2012)
I could see -> taking off as a new kind of punctuation mark(26 apr 2012)
neuronal activation trails as an object wiggles, and that's how you understand it in a continuity of slight reconfigurations. "It is proposed that the short temporal window (e.g., 0.5 sec) of Hebb modifiability helps neurons to learn the statistics of objects moving in the physical world."(25 apr 2012)
the cost of going out in other prose directions is too high, so I play this little game in this little space as though those are the only knobs I can turn(25 apr 2012)
the term "standard technology" for your mental dispositions, analogical toolkit, etc.(25 apr 2012)
Second, it’s almost never sexy. It’s choreographed. You simply can’t tell two actors to “go at it” and let them improvise. No one in the audience would see anything. Heads would be in the way, etc. It’s even less romantic in the film world, where there are camera men in track suits and mics stuck all over the place. Even if the spouse wasn’t there during rehearsal, he would know — just from being married to the actor — how unsexy this stuff is. ((1) How do actors’ spouses feel about love scenes in film and TV? - Quora)(24 apr 2012)
Stet is a Latin word (meaning “let it stand”) used by proofreaders and editors to instruct the typesetter or writer to disregard a change the editor or proofreader …
I mean a singer may put 20 words in eight bars. A rapper may put 140 words in eight bars so it’s a lot being said.(23 apr 2012)
What, you might ask, do mops and Barbies have to do with all this? Well, this is the kind of book that also tells inspirational business stories – for no good intellectual reason, though it might well have the happy side-effect of drumming up lucrative corporate-speaking gigs for the author. Imagine’s very first sentence, trembling with executive drama, is “Procter and Gamble had a problem: it needed a new floor cleaner.” So Lehrer visits 3M (repeating the oft-told story about the invention of the Post-It note), the advertising guy who penned the slogan “Just do it” for Nike (his advice: hire “weird fucks”), and the film studio Pixar, where Steve Jobs ingeniously decreed that all the toilets be put in the central atrium so people would bump into one another. This, we are assured, improves employee “performance”, in the sense of “generating new ideas” for profit.
In David Lodge's Small World (1984), a novel about the academic world of literary criticism, the protagonist causes consternation by asking a panel of eminent but contradictory literary theorists the following question: "What if you were right?"(22 apr 2012)
We saw in Chapter 18 that overfitting can occur when the hypothesis space
is too expressive, so that it contains many hypotheses that fit the data set well. Rather than placing an arbitrary limit on the hypotheses to be considered, Bayesian and MAP learning methods use the prior to penalize complexity. Typically, more complex hypotheses have a lower prior probability-in part because there are usually many more complex hypotheses than simple hypotheses.(22 apr 2012)
LifeAlert: "We save a life from catastrophe every 11 minutes"(20 apr 2012)
Gardner acknowledges that it’s easy to allow the urgency of the moment to make you move too fast and get it wrong. “You must force yourself to be calm, force yourself to slow down, force yourself to think clearly and logically,” he says.
In other words, don’t panic. But the only way not to panic is to practice not panicking. Which is precisely what we do during the remaining nine days, hour after hour, day after day. Gradually, we all become more relaxed, more competent, and more confident. Like emergency professionals, we stop hurrying. We take time to perform a thorough assessment of the person, the injury, and the environment.
Exactly halfway through “Robinson Crusoe,” when Robinson has been alone for fifteen years, he discovers a single human footprint on the beach and is literally made crazy by “the fear of man.” After concluding that the footprint is neither his own nor the Devil’s but, rather, some cannibal intruder’s, he remakes his garden island into a fortress, and for several years he can think of little but concealing himself and repelling imagined invaders. He marvels at the irony that
I whose only affliction was, that I seem’d banish’d from human society, that I was alone, circumscrib’d by the boundless ocean, cut off from mankind, and condemn’d to what I call’d silent life … that I should now tremble at the very apprehensions of seeing a man, and was ready to sink into the ground at but the shadow, or silent appearance of a man’s having set his foot in the island.
Nowhere was Defoe’s psychology more acute than in his imagination of Robinson’s response to the rupture of his solitude. He gave us the first realistic portrait of the radically isolated individual, and then, as if impelled by novelistic truth, he showed us how sick and crazy radical individualism really is. No matter how carefully we defend our selves, all it takes is one footprint of another real person to recall us to the endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships.
David wrote about weather as well as anyone who ever put words on paper, and he loved his dogs more purely than he loved anything or anyone else, but nature itself didn’t interest him, and he was utterly indifferent to birds. Once, when we were driving near Stinson Beach, in California, I’d stopped to give him a telescope view of a long-billed curlew, a species whose magnificence is to my mind self-evident and revelatory. He looked through the scope for two seconds before turning away with patent boredom. “Yeah,” he said with his particular tone of hollow politeness, “it’s pretty.” In the summer before he died, sitting with him on his patio while he smoked cigarettes, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the hummingbirds around his house and was saddened that he could, and while he was taking his heavily medicated afternoon naps I was studying the birds of Ecuador for an upcoming trip, and I understood the difference between his unmanageable misery and my manageable discontents to be that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and he could not.
He was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill. The depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed. Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took the person away from us and made him into a very public legend. People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in the Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul. A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of his books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure. Of course, he was a national treasure, and, being a writer, he didn’t “belong” to his readers any less than to me. But if you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also knew that he was more lovable—funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies—than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him, it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.
Henry Fielding, in “Joseph Andrews,” referred to his characters as “species”—as something more than individual, less than universal. But, as the novel has transformed the cultural environment, species of humanity have given way to a universal crowd of individuals whose most salient characteristic is their being identically entertained. This was the monocultural spectre that David had envisioned and set out to resist in his epic “Infinite Jest.” And the mode of his resistance in that novel—annotation, digression, nonlinearity, hyperlinkage—anticipated the even more virulent and even more radically individualistic invader that is now displacing the novel and its offspring. The blackberry on Robinson Crusoe Island was like the conquering novel, yes, but it seemed to me no less like the Internet, that BlackBerry-borne invasive, which, instead of mapping the self onto a narrative, maps the self onto the world. Instead of the news, my news. Instead of a single football game, the splintering of fifteen different games into personalized fantasy-league statistics. Instead of “The Godfather,” “My Cat’s Funny Trick.” The individual run amok, everyman a Charlie Sheen. With “Robinson Crusoe,” the self had become an island; and now, it seemed, the island was becoming the world.
We now understand a novel to be a mapping of a writer’s experience onto a waking dream, and a crucial turn toward this understanding can be seen in Defoe’s tentative assertion of a less than strictly historical kind of truth—the novelist’s “truth.”
Few readers would dispute that this is the novel’s most compelling section, next to which the adventures of Robinson before and after (being enslaved by a Turkish pirate, fending off the attacks of giant wolves) seem lustreless and rote. Part of the survival story’s appeal is the specificity of Robinson’s recounting of it: the “three … hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows” that are all that remain of his drowned shipmates, the catalogue of useful gear that he salvages from the wrecked ship, the intricacies of stalking the feral goats that populate the island, the nuts and bolts of reinventing the homely arts of making furniture, boats, pottery, and bread. But what really animates these adventureless adventures, and makes them surprisingly suspenseful, is their accessibility to the imagination of the ordinary reader. I have no idea what I would do if I were enslaved by a Turk or menaced by wolves; I might very well be too scared to do what Robinson does. But to read about his practical solutions to the problems of hunger and exposure and illness and solitude is to be invited into the narrative, to imagine what I would do if I were similarly stranded, and to measure my own stamina and resourcefulness and industry against his. (I’m sure my father was doing this, too.) Until the larger world impinges on the island’s isolation, in the form of marauding cannibals, there’s just the two of us, Robinson and his reader, and it’s very cozy. In a more action-packed narrative, the pages detailing Robinson’s everyday tasks and emotions would be what the critic Franco Moretti wryly calls “filler.” But, as Moretti notes, the dramatic expansion of this kind of “filler” was precisely Defoe’s great innovation; such stories of the quotidian became a fixture of realist fiction, in Austen and Flaubert as in Updike and Carver.
"nonplussed" means the opposite of what I thought it did(18 apr 2012)
I can think of a few areas: in early drug discovery, we could use help teasing patterns out of large piles of structure-activity relationship data. I know that there are (and have been) several attempts at doing this, but it’s going to be interesting to see if we can do it better. I would love to be able to dump a big pile of structures and assay data points into a program and have it say the equivalent of “Hey, it looks like an electron-withdrawing group in the piperidine series might be really good, because of its conformational similarity to the initial lead series, but no one’s ever gotten back around to making one of those because everyone got side-tracked by the potency of the chiral amides”. (18 apr 2012)
This sentence structure, with the "is":
For example, I think a legalist in the sense that the term has been used in history, is somebody who adopts a
Khrzhanovsky’s sex appeal seemed incomprehensible, a cosmic joke: He was a slight and homely Jewish boy, given to wearing terrible crushed-velvet jackets. Round glasses dominated his round baby face; you could draw a decent likeness of him using nothing but circles.(18 apr 2012)
From the beginning, Khrzhanovsky knew he was doing something crazy. “Taken one by one, all these details are pure delirium,” he told me on my first night, fanning out a stack of crisp prop rubles with Lenin portraits, each note individually numbered. “Taken together, however, they create an otherwise unachievable depth. When you get paid in this money, and you know it has buying power and an exchange rate, you start treating it differently when the cameras are on. When the cleaning lady had to mop the same toilet floor every day for two years, she will do it differently when she’s doing it on-camera.”(18 apr 2012)
One way to understand this is to note a neglected implication of Moore’s Law for computer processing speed, namely that its use in the value-added process benefits some economic sectors much more than others. In this case the static sector consists of the protected services (a big chunk of health care, education and government jobs), and the dynamic sector is heavily represented in U.S. exports, often consisting of goods and services rooted in tech, connected to tech, or made much more productive by tech innovations. Piece by piece, bit by bit, we Americans are replicating the two-tiered developing economy model, albeit from a much higher base level of wealth and productivity. (What Export-Oriented America Means - Tyler Cowen - The American Interest Magazine)(17 apr 2012)
It’s not just that Silicon Valley and the Pentagon and our universities give the United States a big edge with smart machines. The subtler point is this: The more the world relies on smart machines, the more domestic wage rates become irrelevant for export prowess. That will help the wealthier countries, most of all America. This logic works on both sides. America is using less labor in manufacturing, but China is too, even as its manufacturing output is rising. The fact that Chinese manufacturing employment is falling along with ours means that both our higher wages and their lower wages are becoming less relevant for the location of manufacturing decisions. The less manufacturing has to do with labor costs and relative wage levels, the greater the comparative advantage of the United States.
You’ll hear the word “insourcing” more, too, to join the far more familiar “outsourcing.” For instance, in one manufacturing survey from November 2011, almost one fifth of North American manufacturers claimed to have brought production back from a “low-cost” country to North America. The corresponding number from early 2010 was one tenth of those companies, partly because of rising labor costs in developing nations, and partly because labor costs don’t always matter so much anymore.3
beings only die to be born, in the manner of phalluses that leave bodies in order to enter them.
“in the manner of” as a nice connective(16 apr 2012)
"If I can't buy a girl I like a drink, then what the hell is money for?"(16 apr 2012)
One of the things you'll notice when you start to look into this stuff - the canoeing, cycling, rafting, etc. - is that it's all very program-y. So for instance you'll pay $100 to go on a day-long tour of some sort. Pictures of school groups in life vests.
I'm not suggesting we jump out of a plane unescorted, but for all the other activities, I'd rather avoid guides and programs. I think it would be more fun to just e.g. strap a canoe to our car, bring a couple of tents, and make our way down a river using a map. The fact that it's not immediately obvious how we'd do that is sort of depressing, but God forgive us if we can't figure it out.
The things I always remember from these trips are the little minor adventures where we go off trail. E.g. skiing off piste; doing a little bouldering off the edge of a hike; climbing to a secret beach. The goal is not to get raped by bandit locals, but maybe the most sickening fact of the modern day is how everything I do has to go through some official channel. This constant thinking about whether something is sanctioned, and how I'm "supposed" to find something, all the signing of waivers, the warning signs, all the land that's owned, the check-in times at campsites, has made me into a fucking infant.
I think this way now. I am a machine for generating reasons not to do adventurous things.
Here's a feeling that has been getting me down lately, living in New York. Suppose I got the hankering to climb a tree. Where would I go? Do I have to make a plan? Central Park is a natural choice, but I don't think you're allowed to climb those trees. Maybe there's a ridiculous business that'll charge me $50 to spend a day climbing trees, in a group with people my age, with instructors, and beers afterward at a climbing gym that doubles as a bar.
New York is supposed to be a place with millions of things to do, but it's always this thing where you pay an "adventure kayaking" business $20 to go kayaking on the Hudson. That's plenty fun, and I've willingly paid to do just that before, but jesus christ.
One of these days I will hop down into the subway and roam around. Why? Because I know for sure it'll give me the same feeling I had when I was biking with a friend at canoebrook or making a fire with my brother on a secret beach in western BC. It's not that we're hunting big game here or speed flying but still it's such a thrill if only as a taste of the real and a respite from this pathetic fragile boyhood.(15 apr 2012)
how this notes system is read heavy, and how that relates to, say, two ways of cleaning one's room: first by keeping it clean, by always putting things back, and second by letting messes grow and then dealing with them in one fell swoop.(15 apr 2012)
"You know how some girls are attractive except for one thing (often a nose)? Well, that's X's personality. It's like he's almost interesting.(14 apr 2012)
a rather radical life: like erdos but with writing(14 apr 2012)
Of course this comment was inevitable. If Smalltalkers really believe their environment is the right way to code, their attitude should not be one of “we did this first, meh” but instead be “here’s what we did right, here’s what we did wrong. heed the lessons of history and good luck, you are on a mission from God.”
I think with the proper care and nurturing, we could be at the beginning of a renaissance where many of the great ideas of the 60s and 70s that have been isolated to a small group of people (who are aging rapidly) are being rediscovered and reimagined by this generation. This is happening in no small part due to Rich Hickey and the Clojure community’s unbelievable foresight in developing Clojure and ClojureScript in just the right way that it balances these pure, beautiful ideas with pragmatism in a way that makes them irresistible.
Those who lived through the heyday of Xerox PARC, the AI lab, the lisp machines and Smalltalk should see this as an opportunity to help make sure things don’t go off the rails this time. Otherwise, we may end up back here again in 25 years with the C++ and MySQL of the future installed in our cybernetic implants.
I can already point to projects that are invisibly pushing us towards another deep, sticky, next-generation tarpit, and people are diving in because it’s not yet recognizable as such. (I won’t name names!) Lets try to make it so this time around we truly realize the dreams of computation by encouraging people who are building elegant, beautiful things for the modern era, no matter how much the ideas therein have been tried before.
These threats that people make that they're going to take the nuclear option - are they worse than the option itself?
On the one hand, no, it's someone else's taking the option - saying it out loud - that drives the stake through your heart. Because until then there was always the hopeful chance that their silence implied ignorance - that their not saying anything implied they didn't have anything to say.
Example: Suppose you're insecure about your bad skin. In general polite people won't say anything about it, just as they wouldn't say anything about a missing leg or the scars from a burn. In front of you they will operate as if you look perfectly normal. Their eyes may linger on those trouble areas, but always in a plausibly deniable way.
Their tact enforces the mutual illusion that nothing is wrong - "mutual" because their performance is so good that you're inclined to believe it. You're made to forget your blemish, or to think it's maybe not so bad, because it has been gracefully factored out of all your interactions. But of course there is something wrong, and of course they notice it, and the moment they say so is the moment of the illusion's undoing, and your ego's implosion. That's what makes the nuclear option nuclear: your insecurities are revealed to be not the oversensitive preening of a mind low on self-esteem, but rather, the truth. The fears you had about yourself are warranted. Your acne is no secret.
When the nuclear option is exercised you are forced, often in a violent way, to confront the twin facts, first that you have unattractive bad skin, and second, that someone you're close to, who has pretended they're not repulsed by it in order to save your ego, really is repulsed by it, and no longer wants your ego saved.
—
On the other hand, though, the threat of the nuclear option operates in a potentially more devastating way than the option-taking itself, if only because it sets in motion a terrible internal search for insecurities. What I mean is that when someone says to you, "I'm going to be really mean in a second," or something to that effect ("I could take this to a whole other level"), you begin to think, "What could they say?", and the answer to that question is just a mental inventory of all the negative things about yourself you wouldn't like acknowledged out loud - precisely those things subject to the kind of "mutual illusion" that saves an ego and keeps a people running.(14 apr 2012)
The joke this week was: How was an I.R.S. rote examiner like a mushroom? Both kept in the dark and fed horseshit. He didn’t know how mushrooms even worked, if it was true that you scooped waste on them. Sheri’s cooking wasn’t what you would call at the level of adding mushrooms.
how working at a library can be hard on your knees.
"all the shelving?"
"yeah, and I mostly worked the children's section, so I was constantly bending."(13 apr 2012)
the overweight girls who maybe ook at me like well, maybe… and what I know. this is devastating on two counts - first, because I'm shutting down her fancy, and second, because the symmetrical thing must be happening in the minds of my fanciful look-sees.(13 apr 2012)
the image of someone crossing their legs, father style, and perching a book between their toes - turning the pages every so often with an impossibly dextrous toe maneuver, maybe bringing their big toe up for a lick just as one would a finger. crucial here is that they're doing something else with their (now free) hands, like eating from a dinner plate.(13 apr 2012)
like paris review's "the art of fiction" and inside the actors studio for scientists(13 apr 2012)
(Like all editors, topical bloggers love having truly good “content” delivered to their front doorstep. In fact what’s most exciting about being a successful blogger, in my view, is that you become a gravity well for good ideas.)(12 apr 2012)
Will we end up with a “field of fireflies” model, with dozens, hundreds of tiny companies flickering on and off?(12 apr 2012)
In the meantime, one biotech model gaining traction is the single asset, infrastructure-lite, development model, which deploys modest amounts of capital to develop a single compound to an early clinical data package which can be partnered with pharma. The asset resides within an LLC, and following the license transaction, the LLC is wound down and distributes the upfront, milestone and royalty payments to the LLC members on a pro rata basis. The key to success in this model is choosing the appropriate asset/indication – one where it is possible to get to a clinical data package on limited capital. This approach excludes many molecules and indications often favored by biotech, and tends to drive towards clinical studies using biomarkers – directly in line with one of pharma’s favored strategies.
a stark fact: Only 5.5% of the holders of commercialized patents are women.(12 apr 2012)
But since all our assets in pharma are wasting ones (patent expirations!), it doesn’t do you much long-term good if you’re not discovering new drugs quickly enough.(12 apr 2012)
On February 11, 1954, IDF private Nathan Elbaz was disarming grenades when he noticed one of the grenade’s safeties had slipped. He grabbed the grenade and ran from the tent but realized he wouldn’t be able to throw the grenade away without harming some of his friends, so he smothered the explosion with his body. (Falling on a grenade - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(12 apr 2012)
Scientists are currently debating whether we and octopuses evolved eyes separately, or whether a common ancestor had the makings of the eye. But intelligence is another matter. “The same thing that got them their smarts isn’t the same thing that got us our smarts,” says Mather, “because our two ancestors didn’t have any smarts.” Half a billion years ago, the brainiest thing on the planet had only a few neurons. Octopus and human intelligence evolved independently.
“Octopuses,” writes philosopher Godfrey-Smith, “are a separate experiment in the evolution of the mind.” And that, he feels, is what makes the study of the octopus mind so philosophically interesting.
tk's object design, which helps us nitwits do our jobs better, vs. pj's, which confuses everyone(12 apr 2012)
a CEO wide-eyed on the kitchen tour at per se, amazed at the efficiency, loving the shouted orders ("one and one!")(12 apr 2012)
when you go to starbucks, what are you actually paying for? how much of that dollar goes toward the coffee? you're paying for a ceo, you're paying for consultants, you're paying for…(12 apr 2012)
For me, it was a momentous occasion. I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent.
Early on in our history, it’s thought that most of us lived in bands of maybe five to 25 people, and that bands formed bands of bands that we might call tribes. And maybe tribes were 150 people or so on. And then tribes gave way to chiefdoms that might have been thousands of people. And chiefdoms eventually gave way to nation-states that might have been tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people. And so, our evolutionary history has been one of living in larger and larger and larger social groups.
What I want to suggest is that that evolutionary history will have selected for less and less and less innovation in individuals, because a little bit of innovation goes a long way. If we imagine that there’s some small probability that someone is a creator or an innovator, and the rest of us are followers, we can see that one or two people in a band is enough for the rest of us to copy, and so we can get on fine. And, because social learning is so efficient and so rapid, we don’t need all to be innovators. We can copy the best innovations, and all of us benefit from those.
“Well, what do you want?” Vincent shot back. “You’ve not been able to tell me what you want.”“I don’t know,” Jobs said. “You have to bring me something new. Nothing you’ve shown me is even close.” Vincent argued back and suddenly Jobs went ballistic. “He just started screaming at me,” Vincent recalled. Vincent could be volatile himself, and the volleys escalated. When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, “You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”
I’ll know it when I see it. That was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge. He looked at the title bars—the headers that run across the top of windows and documents—that his team of software developers had designed for the original Macintosh and decided he didn’t like them. He forced the developers to do another version, and then another, about twenty iterations in all, insisting on one tiny tweak after another, and when the developers protested that they had better things to do he shouted, “Can you imagine looking at that every day? It’s not just a little thing. It’s something we have to do right.”
the volleyball stance that was pioneered by a pedophilic coach in the 1970s(10 apr 2012)
Why don't people talk in chat rooms anymore?
There is an opportunity for some kind of system that allows ephemeral chats to spring out of Twitter streams & circles, publish some tweets/quotes back to Twitter, and evaporate.(10 apr 2012)
I remember not being at all comfortable with the idea of Jafar being granted this wish to become the most powerful genie ever, even if it meant he'd be sucked up into a bottle and cast into the middle of the desert. I was anxious about it. I knew he'd come back.(10 apr 2012)
“popular mechanics” as a descriptor of what I want to write about and how(10 apr 2012)
Another fact about speed - and here it's important to compare Erdos - is this: I find Sartre stimulating, difficult and frustrating. His later writings are unreadable, driven by his use of the drug speed and written with no concessions to the reader.(10 apr 2012)
As a teenager, I also picked out Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy from the local public library, which was one of the great inspirations for me. The library, that is, rather than the book. I think it’s the route out of suburbia for a lot of people
story idea: a tagalong on a david attenborough production, perhaps one of his last(09 apr 2012)
Whenever you don't know what to write, go back to the text and reread / skim / page through that text: puzzle over beginnings, endings, key (marked) passages.
Don't read books—unless they're library books—without marking in them: make them your own by annotations.
Don't read without keeping notes—in some form—on what you're reading.
When we read, we make more-or-less provisional interpretive assertions continually, but good papers begin with questions rather than answers; great papers are built around great questions. Writing a paper that explores a great question or set of questions is immeasurably more interesting than writing a paper that's designed simply to tell yourself or someone else what you (and, probably, they as well) already know.
Real questions rarely have single answers; real questions—interesting questions—most often involve tensions, contradictions, cross-purposes in their complex answers, and those answers open up the subject rather than tying it all up neatly.
You cannot discover and create real questions (and they always involve some complex mixture of making and discovery) without writing—writing notes, outlines, journals, possible paragraphs, provisional formulations of questions. All of this writing—pages and pages of it—will be primarily for yourself; it will underlie your final, formal paper, and it may provide you with phrases and assertions, but it will not be directed toward drafting the paper. It will be directed toward figuring out what questions you hold and what kinds of possibilities those questions present to you as a writer.
Once you've got questions around a topic, turn back to the text, yet again, and find passages you'll have to talk about. If the questions are really good, the return to the text will also generate further twists and wrinkles and refinements to those questions.
Don't just choose passages you know will fit easily into your idea / topic. The real twist to your argument lies most often at the heart of the passage or textual moment / event that doesn't fit. Dwell on the places in a text that you find deeply disturbing, dazzlingly complex, utterly baffling—or that you wish the author hadn't included (since the text here seems not to fit with what you'd like to say): if you can work these into your project, you'll move that entire project to a higher and a more exciting level.
Remember that a good thesis does not simply tell the reader what she or he already knows. Your job is to communicate a set of insights to your reader that will give that reader a surprising, perhaps even a new understanding of some aspect of the text. One way to ask yourself if your thesis approaches this kind of illumination is to try framing your thesis in the rhetorical form: “You might think X but in fact Y.”
Make sure you can articulate the logic of your arrangement of passages / points in your essay: you'll probably find this most easy to do if you compose some form of outline of your essay as you are thinking about matters of arrangement.
As you write, make it a practice to reread your whole essay-in-progress often; ideally you'll have time enough, as well, to let it sit for at least a few hours before you reread it yet again: the idea here is to work at getting some kind of critical distance on your own prose.
Run spell check, and work, too, on cultivating your proofreading abilities. There are a great many mistakes that spell checkers cannot catch. Also make sure you give the draft at least one reading where all you think about are details of punctuation and spelling, placement of quotation marks, citation form, etc.
Good writing takes time; try to plan so that you have had as much time as possible to think about and write your essay.
Read, read, read. You can no more expect to write well without also reading a great deal of good writing than you could expect to compose music without also being an avid listener to music.
Every teacher has things to say about writing in general and your writing in particular: make sure you make use of office hours. In my experience, the students who get the most out of this University—with its extraordinary resources and its equally extraordinary size—are those who make consistent efforts to participate in class and who talk also with their teachers outside of class.
Your peers have a lot to say about writing as well. Get in the habit of sharing your ideas and drafts with friends. It's something the faculty do with one another; why shouldn't you start doing the same for yourselves? In this way, your writing—a largely solitary act—also makes you part of an intellectual community. And, from my point of view, it's the promise of belonging to a number of overlapping intellectual communities in our time here that makes being at this University so exciting.
a career as a rocket launch, one boost begetting the next.(09 apr 2012)
So pleas’d at first, the towring Alps we try,
Mount o’er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky;
Th’ Eternal Snows appear already past,
And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last:
But those attain’d, we tremble to survey
The growing Labours of the lengthen’d Way,
Th’ increasing Prospect tires our wandring Eyes,
Hills peep o’er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!
Otic notches are invagination in the posterior margin of the skull roof, one behind each orbit. Such notches are found in labyrinthodonts and some of their immediate ancestors, but not their reptilian descendants. The presence or absence of the otic notches is one of the traits used to separate the amniotes from the amphibiangradetetrapods.
The notches have been interpreted as part of an auditory structure, and are often shown holding a tympanum similar to those seen in modern anurans. Analysis of the columella (the stapes in amphibians and reptiles) of labyrinthodonts however indicate it did not function in transmitting low energy vibrations, thus rendering them effectively deaf to airborne sound.[1] The otic notch instead functioned as a spiracle, at least in the early forms.[2]
Conceptus (latin is conceptio, derivatives of zygote) denotes the embryo and its adnexa (appendages or adjunct parts) or associated membranes (i.e. the products of conception).[1] The conceptus includes all structures that develop from the zygote, both embryonic and extraembryonic. It includes the embryo as well as the embryonic part of the placenta and its associated membranes - amnion, chorion (gestational sac), and yolk sac. (Conceptus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(06 apr 2012)
But upon the general
question, whether the owner is answerable criminaliter, for a battery
upon his own slave, or other exercise of authority or force, not forbidden by
statute, the Court entertains but little doubt.—That he is so liable, has never
yet been decided; nor, as far as is known, been hitherto contended. There have
been no prosecutions of the sort. The established habits and uniform practice
of the country in this respect, is the best evidence of the portion of power,
deemed by the whole community, requisite to the preservation of the master’s
dominion. If we thought differently, we could not set our notions in array
against the judgment of every body else, and say that this, or that authority,
may be safely lopped off. This has indeed been assimilated at the bar to the
other domestic relations; and arguments drawn from the well established
principles, which confer and restrain the authority of the parent over the
child, the tutor over the pupil, the master over the apprentice, have been
pressed on us. The Court does not recognize their application. There is no
likeness between the cases. They are in opposition to each other, and there is
an impassable gulf between them.— The difference is that which exists between
freedom and slavery—and a greater cannot be imagined. In the one, �the end in view is the happiness of the youth,
born to equal rights with that governor, on whom the duty devolves of training
the young to usefulness, in a station which he is afterwards to assume among
freemen. To such an end, and with such a subject, moral and intellectual
instruction seem the natural means; and for the most part, they are found to
suffice. Moderate force is superadded, only to make the others effectual. If
that fail, it is better to leave the party to his own headstrong passions, and
the ultimate correction of the law, than to allow it to be immoderately inflicted
by a private person. With slavery it is far otherwise. The end is the profit of
the master, his security and the public safety; the subject, one doomed in his
own person, and his posterity, to live without knowledge, and without the
capacity to make any thing his own, and to toil that another may reap the
fruits. What moral considerations shall be addressed to such a being, to
convince him what, it is impossible but that the most stupid must feel and know
can never be true—that he is thus to labour upon a principle of natural duty,
or for the sake of his own personal happiness, such services can only be
expected from one who has no will of his own; who surrenders his will in
implicit obedience to that of another. Such obedience is the consequence only
of uncontrolled authority over the body. There is nothing else which can
operate to produce the effect. The power of the master must be absolute, to
render the submission of the slave perfect. I most freely confess my sense of
the harshness of this proposition, I feel it as deeply as any man can. And as a
principle of moral right, every person in his retirement must repudiate it. But
in the actual condition of things, it must be so. There is no remedy. This
discipline belongs to the state of slavery. They cannot be disunited, without
abrogating at once the rights of the master, and absolving the slave from his
subjection. It constitutes the curse of slavery to both the bond and free portions
of our population. But it is inherent in the relation of master and slave.(06 apr 2012)
Why so? It is only because Followers of the Path do not understand that all periods of time are empty that there are such hinderances. This is not the case with the one who has truly attained the Path. He follows all conditions and works out all past karmas. He freely wears any garment. He walks wherever he wants to walk and sits wherever he wants to sit. He does not for a single instant think of seeking Buddhahood. Why so? An ancient saying says: “If one seeks after Buddhahood, the Buddha will become the cause of transmigration.”
Reverend Sirs, time is precious. Don’t make the mistake of following others in desperately studying meditation or the Path, learning words or phrases, seeking after the Buddha or patriarchs or good friends. Followers of the Path, you have only one father and one mother. What else do you want? Look into yourselves .
Otherwise, like any freelancer with a cadre of repeat customers, JASON ensures that its expertise and its customers’ questions are, as JASONs say, impedance-matched — an electronics term for complementary cables that allow the fullest flow of current.
JASON comprises 30–40 scientists, mostly stellar academics, usually with broad interests, all with top-secret clearances. The scientists meet for six weeks every summer in La Jolla, California, in what they say are grubby little offices, to answer questions from five to ten sponsors, all government agencies. Questions must be well defined, specific, answerable and useful. So, as the JASONs say, no “standing around admiring the problem”.
The point of the talk is not to please you, by reminding yourself
of what a badass you are, but to tell your audience something useful and
interesting. (Note to graduate students: It is important that
you internalize that you are, in fact,
a badass, but it is also important that then you move on. Needing to have
your ego stroked by random academics listening to talks is a sign that you have
not yet reached this stage.) Unless something matters to your actual message,
it really doesn’t belong in the main body of the talk.
Writing on a computer, making heavy use of the delete key, probably forces me to focus too much on the micromechanics of a sentence. I'd probably do well to be jostled often by real full drafts in front of me - and that's what I'd get if I used a typewriter. Each editing cycle would be at the level of a paragraph or section, not a sentence, and the revisions would happen in a different mode (with pen and paper).
There is also the phenomenon of having to think before you type.(04 apr 2012)
The New Yorker signature display typeface, used for its nameplate and headlines and the masthead above The Talk of the Town section, is called “Irvin” or “Irvin type,” after him. (Rea Irvin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(04 apr 2012)
Men are overawed, not to say terrified, by the ability of women to produce babies. (Asked by a lady intellectual to summarize the differences between the sexes, another bishop responded, “Madam, I cannot conceive.”) It gives women an unchallengeable authority. And one of the earliest origins of humor that we know about is its role in the mockery of authority. Irony itself has been called “the glory of slaves
But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same, And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be
deadlier than the male.
There is often a “value of experimentation” where agents will pull an arm with a lower current expected value than another arm because, for instance, learning that the second arm above is the type with expected value 2 will increase my payoff from now until infinity, while I only pay the cost of experimenting now; in many single-person bandit problems(03 apr 2012)
the key process improvement will be to (a) write throughout the research, like halmos writes, (and also like I write) and (b) get more feedback early(03 apr 2012)
those people who threaten you with their bad moods(03 apr 2012)
In the deservedly famous chapter on “The Stream of Thought” James
takes himself to be offering a richer account of experience than those
of traditional empiricists such as Hume. He believes relations, vague
fringes, and tendencies are experienced directly (a view he would
later defend as part of his “radical empiricism.”) James finds
consciousness to be a stream rather than a succession of “ideas.” Its
waters blend, and our individual consciousness — or, as he
prefers to call it sometimes, our “sciousness” — is “steeped and
dyed” in the waters of sciousness or thought that surround it. Our
psychic life has rhythm: it is a series of transitions and
resting-places, of “flights and perchings” (PP 236). We rest when we
remember the name we have been searching for; and we are off again
when we hear a noise that might be the baby waking from her nap. (William James (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy))(02 apr 2012)
“Look”, I said, “I can’t ‘just put down what I’m going to be working on for the year’, because I don’t know. I can’t ‘just focus on the projects that are most likely to succeed’, because I don’t know what those are. I don’t care what it says on the org chart. I’m in research, and my real bosses are a bunch of cells in a dish and a bunch of rats in cages. They determine what I’m going to work on next. And they can’t be coached for success, and they don’t care how much team spirit I have, because they don’t listen to me.” (‘Just Be More Productive!’: The Trouble With Coaching for Success - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic)(02 apr 2012)
The main advantages of the Kalashnikov rifle are its simple design, fairly compact size and adaptation to mass production. It is inexpensive to manufacture, and easy to clean and maintain. Its ruggedness and reliability are legendary.[26][27] The AK-47 was initially designed for ease of operation and repair by glove-wearing Soviet soldiers in Arctic conditions. The large gas piston, generous clearances between moving parts, and tapered cartridge case design allow the gun to endure large amounts of foreign matter and fouling without failing to cycle. This reliability comes at the cost of accuracy, as the looser tolerances do not allow for precision and consistency. Reflecting Soviet infantry doctrine of its time, the rifle is meant to be part of massed infantry fire, not long range engagements. The average service life of an AK-47 is 20 to 40 years depending on the conditions to which it has been exposed. (AK-47 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(02 apr 2012)
The AK-47 is best described as a hybrid of previous rifle technology innovations: the trigger, double locking lugs and unlocking raceway of the M1 Garand/M1 carbine,[15] the safety mechanism of the John Browning designed Remington Model 8 rifle,[16] and the gas system and layout of the Sturmgewehr 44. Kalashnikov’s team had access to all of these weapons and had no need to “reinvent the wheel”,[17][18] though he denied that his design was based on the German Sturmgewehr 44 assault rifle.[19] Kalashnikov himself observed: “A lot of Russian Army soldiers ask me how one can become a constructor, and how new weaponry is designed. These are very difficult questions. Each designer seems to have his own paths, his own successes and failures. But one thing is clear: before attempting to create something new, it is vital to have a good appreciation of everything that already exists in this field. I myself have had many experiences confirming this to be so.” (AK-47 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(02 apr 2012)
Both Moore’s Law and Hall’s Law in the speculative form that I have proposed, are exponential trajectories. These trajectories generally emerge when some sort of runaway positive-feedback process is unleashed, through the breaking of some boundary constraint (the term break boundary is due to Marshall McLuhan).
The positive-feedback part is critical (if you know some math, you can guess why: a “doubling” law in a difference/differential equation form has to be at least a first-order process; something like compound interest, if you don’t know what the math terms mean).
Loosely speaking, this implies a technological process that can be applied to itself, improving it. Better machines with interchangeable parts also means better machine tools that are themselves made with interchangeable parts and therefore can run continuously at higher speeds, with low downtime. Computers can be used to design more complex computers.(02 apr 2012)
Put another way, craft is about relative precision between unlike parts. Engineering based on interchangeability is about objective precision between like parts. One requires human judgment. The other requires refined metrology.(02 apr 2012)
The problem is that even the highest-quality craft does not scale. When something like a rifle is mass-produced using interchangeable parts, breakdowns can be fixed using parts cannibalized from other broken-down rifles (so two broken rifles can be mashed-up to make at least one that works) or with spare parts shipped from an warehouse. Manufacturing can be centralized or distributed in optimal ways, and constantly improved. Production schedules can be decoupled from demand schedules.
A craftsman-made rifle on the other hand, requires a custom-made/fitted replacement part. The problem is especially severe for an object like a rifle: small, widely-dispersed geographically, and liable to break down in the unfriendliest of conditions. Conditions where minimizing repair time is of the essence, and skilled craftsmen are rather thin on the ground. It is no surprise that the problem was first solved for guns.(02 apr 2012)
The basic principles of neurotransmission are well understood. Nervous impulses travel along the nerve fibre until they reach the nerve terminal. The signals cannot cross synapses – the tiny junctions between neurons – so they are converted into a chemical signal. At the terminal, neurotransmitter molecules are stored in spherical structures called vesicles, and the arrival of a nervous impulse causes these to fuse with the terminal membrane and release their contents into the synapse. The transmitter molecules then diffuse across the synapse and bind to receptors on the membrane of the neighbouring cell, causing it to generate its own nervous impulses. (02 apr 2012)
Since Memento was made, a number of studies have shown that amnesic patients have difficulty not only rememberign past events but also imagining the future. These studies suggest that our ability to imagine future events is dependent on the reconstructive nature of memory - we simulate events that have not yet taken place by stitching together fragments of memories of past events(01 apr 2012)
a gathered strip or pleated border of a skirt or petticoat. ("frills and furbelows")(01 apr 2012)
There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter; but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders: the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.(01 apr 2012)
The first sounds Dean uttered were subverbal—na-na-na and ba-ba-ba—and recalled her hooks for Rihanna. Then came disjointed words, culled from her phone—“taking control … never die tonight … I can’t live a lie”—in her low-down, growly singing voice, so different from her coquettish speaking voice. Had she been “writing” in a conventional sense—trying to come up with clever, meaningful lyrics—the words wouldn’t have fit the beat as snugly. Grabbing random words out of her BlackBerry also seemed to set Dean’s melodic gift free; a well-turned phrase would have restrained it. There was no verse or chorus in the singing, just different melodic and rhythmic parts. Her voice as we heard it in the control room had been Auto-Tuned, so that Dean could focus on making her vocal as expressive as possible and not worry about hitting all the notes.
After several minutes of nonsense singing, the song began to coalesce. Almost imperceptibly, the right words rooted themselves in the rhythm while melodies and harmonies emerged in Dean’s voice. Her voice isn’t hip-hop or rock or country or gospel or soul, exactly, but it could be any one of those. “I’ll come alive tonight,” she sang. Dancing now, Dean raised one arm in the air. After a few more minutes, the producers told her she could come back into the control room.
Their second attempt was more promising. Dean carried her iced coffee into the recording booth, which adjoined the control room. She was dimly visible through the soundproofed glass window, bathed in greenish light. She took out her BlackBerry, and as the track began to play she surfed through lists of phrases she had copied from magazines and television programs. She showed me a few: “life in the fast lane,” “crying shame,” “high and mighty,” “mirrors don’t lie,” “don’t let them see you cry.” Some phrases were categorized under headings like “Sex and the City,” “Interjections,” and “British Slang.”
Top Forty radio was invented by Todd Storz and Bill Stewart, the operator and program director, respectively, of KOWH, an AM station in Omaha, Nebraska, in the early fifties. Like most music programmers of the day, Storz and Stewart provided a little something for everyone. As Marc Fisher writes in his book “Something in the Air” (2007), “The gospel in radio in those days was that no tune ought to be repeated within twenty-four hours of its broadcast—surely listeners would resent having to hear the same song twice in one day.” The eureka moment, as Ben Fong-Torres describes it in “The Hits Just Keep on Coming” (1998), occurred in a restaurant across from the station, where Storz and Stewart would often wait for Storz’s girlfriend, a waitress, to get off work. They noticed that even though the waitresses listened to the same handful of songs on the jukebox all day long, played by different customers, when the place finally cleared out and the staff had the jukebox to themselves they played the very same songs. The men asked the waitresses to identify the most popular tunes on the jukebox, and they went back to the station and started playing them, in heavy rotation. Ratings soared.
It's funny, I've been thinking… that picture of the computer is drowned out a little bit by the way that we use computers, which is mostly as messaging systems of various stripes, and there's kind of a sad thing there where the computer, in history, as a sociological thing, it has this trajectory that starts very mundane and blows up like crazy, and you see it as a universal computational tool, infinitely modular, the pieces can change dynamically, any program can be conceived in it, and then it sort of tapers off again, and becomes a word processor, a spreadsheet, a communications device. And I'm wondering if part of the reason there's a kind of confusion about AI among the general public is there… there's been this lost picture of what the computer can do.(30 mar 2012)
“I tend to cover any given topic in a brace of interlinked posts”(29 mar 2012)
it's probably true, and PE problems tell me this, that I simply don't think enough(29 mar 2012)
selling entertainment because you can't sell confusion.(29 mar 2012)
moore's law is like getting the star and the lightning in mario kart at the same time(29 mar 2012)
Ignorant people say they like all music but country music. Ignorant or boring people. Not that country music is some transcendent force that people should universally subscribe to, it’s far from that, but it’s a lazy argument to define your entire taste in music as a negative.
With the evolution of iTunes and iPods and Pandora and Turntable and Spotify asking what kind of music someone listens to seems a boring, idle, pickup question of sorts. No person is able to define what kind of music they listen to by stating genres. FM radio DJs do not control exposure to music. People are not pigeon holed by preset dials on a radio or the album they paid $14.99 for. That doesn’t mean music has evolved, but it does mean that everyone has the capacity to have diverse tastes in music. It’s not unique or interesting to align yourself against a particular type of music. It’s lazy. But so is the question that would lead to that answer.(28 mar 2012)
And then you see that the blond man has forgotten himself; feeling unobserved, he is gazing through the car window at the pointed fir trees, and his glance is free and untroubled, full of youth, yearning, and naive, ardent dreams.(26 mar 2012)
And we have never seen that. Or I mean, we have seen numbers like that, in epidemics or chain reactions, and there’s no question it’s a very interesting phenomenon. But still, it’s very hard not to just look at it from our point of view. What does it mean to us? What does it mean to my investments? What does it mean to my ability to have all the music I want on my iPhone? That kind of thing. But there’s something else going on. We’re seeing a fraction of one percent of it, and there’s this other 99.99 percent that people just aren’t looking at.
The beginning of this was driven by two problems. The problem of nuclear weapons design, and the problem of code breaking were the two drivers of the dawn of this computational universe. There were others, but those were the main ones.
What’s the driver today? You want one word? It’s advertising. And, you may think advertising is very trivial, and of no real importance, but I think it’s the driver. If you look at what most of these codes are doing, they’re trying to get the audience, trying to deliver the audience. The money is flowing as advertising.
One number that’s interesting, and easy to remember, was in the year 1953, there were 53 kilobytes of high-speed memory on planet earth. This is random access high-speed memory. Now you can buy those 53 kilobytes for an immeasurably small, thousandth of one cent or something. If you draw the graph, it’s a very nice, clean graph. That’s sort of Moore’s Law; that it’s doubling. It has a doubling time that’s surprisingly short, and no end in sight, no matter what the technology does. We’re doubling the number of bits in a extraordinarily short time. (A Universe Of Self-replicating Code | Conversation | Edge)(26 mar 2012)
There was a great Dutch documentary—Money and Speed: Inside the Black Box—where they spoke to someone named Eric Scott Hunsader who actually had captured the data on a much finer time scale, and there was all sorts of very interesting stuff going on. But it’s happening so quickly that it’s below what our normal trading programs are able to observe, they just aren’t accounting for those very fast things. And this could be happening all around us—not just in the world of finance. We would not necessarily even perceive it, that there’s a whole world of communication that’s not human communication. It’s machines communicating with machines. And they may be communicating money, or information that has other meaning—but if it is money, we eventually notice it. It’s just the small warm pond sitting there waiting for the spark. (A Universe Of Self-replicating Code | Conversation | Edge)(26 mar 2012)
We’re missing a tremendous opportunity. We’re asleep at the switch because it’s not a metaphor. In 1945 we actuallydidcreate a new universe. This is a universe of numbers with a life of their own, that we only see in terms of what those numbers can do for us. Can they record this interview? Can they play our music? Can they order our books on Amazon? If you cross the mirror in the other direction, there really is a universe of self-reproducing digital code. When I last checked, it was growing by five trillion bits per second. And that’s not just a metaphor for something else. It actually is. It’s a physical reality.
Very few people are looking at this digital universe in an objective way. Danny Hillis is one of the few people who is. His comment, made exactly 30 years ago in 1982, was that “memory locations are just wires turned sideways in time”. That’s just so profound. That should be engraved on the wall.
We’re still here at the big bang of this thing, and we’re not studying it enough. Who’s the cosmologist really looking at this in terms of what it might become in 10,000 years? What’s it going to be in 100 years? Here we are at the very beginning and we just may simply not be asking the right questions about what’s going on. Try looking at it from the other side, not from our side as human beings. Scientists are the people who can do that kind of thing. You can look at viruses from the point of view of a virus, not from the point of view of someone getting sick.
I’ve experienced a tire failure in a 727 on landing that we never felt. It was only after the tower mentioned seeing something that we stopped and had it checked out. So it’s difficult to say whether or not the Delta pilots knew about it in this case. Unlike the 777, the 767-300 has no tire pressure indicators in the cockpit.
And if the airplane is above 80 knots, pilots are taught not to abort the takeoff unless the airplane is unflyable or on fire.
After liftoff, the pilots were right in electing to fly to their destination, as an overweight landing with a blown tire might not be the best choice.(25 mar 2012)
women probably think about getting older more than men do(25 mar 2012)
I don’t know why we live—the gift of life comes to us from I don’t know what source or for what purpose; but I believe we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a certain point) life is the most valuable thing we know anything about and it is therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is any yet left in the cup. In other words consciousness is an illimitable power, and though at times it may seem to be all consciousness of misery, yet in the way it propagates itself from wave to wave, so that we never cease to feel, though at moments we appear to, try to, pray to, there is something that holds one in one’s place, makes it a standpoint in the universe which it is probably good not to forsake. You are right in your consciousness that we are all echoes and reverberations of the same, and you are noble when your interest and pity as to everything that surrounds you, appears to have a sustaining and harmonizing power. Only don’t, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses—remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another’s, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. Don’t melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can. We all live together, and those of us who love and know, live so most. We help each other—even unconsciously, each in our own effort, we lighten the effort of others, we contribute to the sum of success, make it possible for others to live. Sorrow comes in great waves—no one can know that better than you—but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see. My dear Grace, you are passing through a darkness in which I myself in my ignorance see nothing but that you have been made wretchedly ill by it; but it is only a darkness, it is not an end, or the end. Don’t think, don’t feel, any more than you can help, don’t conclude or decide—don’t do anything but wait. Everything will pass, and serenity and accepted mysteries and disillusionments, and the tenderness of a few good people, and new opportunities and ever so much of life, in a word, will remain. You will do all sorts of things yet, and I will help you. The only thing is not to melt in the meanwhile. I insist upon the necessity of a sort of mechanical condensation—so that however fast the horse may run away there will, when he pulls up, be a somewhat agitated but perfectly identical G. N. left in the saddle. Try not to be ill—that is all; for in that there is a future. You are marked out for success, and you must not fail. You have my tenderest affection and all my confidence.(22 mar 2012)
The technology that powered Siri was born from SRI’s CALO project, the largest artificial intelligence project in U.S. history. It’s complex technology that linked machine learning to natural language. In other words, it’s technology that made artificial intelligence accessible and useful to the regular person.
Two months after its launch, Apple acquired Siri for more than $200 million.
nothing quite prized like a female of the species(20 mar 2012)
Productivity ought to be our slave. We must remember not to be weighed down by expectations of doing this or that, of getting this or that done. Sure, it’s nice to get things done, to produce things, to affect the change we want to see in the world, to leave a legacy. But it would be cheating ourselves to allow this obsession to overshadow – to crowd out, for you economists – the simple joy of living. This basic pleasure, the taking of joy in what we do, being fascinated by something or someone, is our birthright, and should be engineered, hardwired into any proper way of organizing human life; if not, well then that’s grounds for civil disobedience, for a quiet kind of rebellion(19 mar 2012)
The idea that most of what we call programming is just paperwork is not at all original to me.(19 mar 2012)
I now know why all those rituals were necessary. What galls me is that, twenty-plus years later, pointless rituals haven’t gone away. Most of what I’ve stuffed my brain with since then are the random things that must be done before real work begins.(19 mar 2012)
the gov't as the world's largest restaurant-that's-expensive-for-the-wrong-reasons(18 mar 2012)
missing a shot on your own basket as the clearest example of two wrongs making a right.(18 mar 2012)
aesthetic judgment. these politico kids — it's like somebody "into movies," not in the sense of going to the theater a bunch, but in the sense of reading a bunch of movie reviews. here you have two kinds of critics: the artsy-loving, blockbuster-hating refined guy, and the the-other-guy-is-pretentious man-of-the-people. more interested in the tones here being lobbed back and forth, in the playing field, and in the aesthetics of self-image, than in the movies themselves.(18 mar 2012)
inside the development of a major game. think of all the aspects. and the mechanics — every detail accounted for. these are our cathedrals.(18 mar 2012)
There is nothing fun about this kind of creativity, which consists mostly of sweat and failure. It’s the red pen on the page and the discarded sketch, the trashed prototype and the failed first draft. Nietzsche referred to this as the “rejecting process,” noting that while creators like to brag about their big epiphanies, their everyday reality was much less romantic. “All great artists and thinkers are great workers,” he wrote.
This relentless form of creativity is nicely exemplified by the legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser, who engraved the slogan “Art is Work” above his office door. Mr. Glaser’s most famous design is a tribute to this work ethic. In 1975, he accepted an intimidating assignment: to create a new ad campaign that would rehabilitate the image of New York City, which at the time was falling apart.
Our experience is that most citizens like to talk to a police officer. Such exchanges give them a sense of importance, provide them with the basis for gossip, and allow them to explain to the authorities what is worrying them (whereby they gain a modest but significant sense of having “done something” about the problem). You approach a person on foot more easily, and talk to him more readily, than you do a person in a car.
“It’s a Victorian hallucinogen, where the whole world suddenly comes alive and begins moving, so that the likeness between seagulls and sandpipers on the beach where you are reading suddenly becomes spookily animated, part of a single restless whole, with the birds’ giant lizard ancestors looming like ghosts above them. What looks like the fixed, unchanging solitude of the beach and ocean suddenly becomes alive to, vulnerable to, and endless chain of change and movement. It’s a book that makes the whole world vibrate.”(14 mar 2012)
First, as we started to descend I instinctively went back to my seat and buckled up. But I noticed a lot of the other “frequent flyers” were still up and walking around. So I asked one of them, “When are we supposed to sit down?” They just kind of laughed at my “noob question” and said something to the effect of— “You don’t really have to sit down at all just watch how the pilot lands this thing.” So people were still up and walking around as the plane landed. For someone who had only flown commercial it was a fascinating to me for some reason. Sure enough- the pilot put her down like a feather and came to a gentle stop. ((1) Air Force One: What’s it like to fly on Air Force One? - Quora)(13 mar 2012)
And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.
Some of that growth has resulted from a phenomenon called Baumol’s disease, after the economist William J. Baumol, who described it in a 1965 article he wrote with William G. Bowen. The basic idea is that while productivity gains have made it possible to assemble cars with only a tiny fraction of the labor that was once required, it still takes four musicians nine minutes to perform Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 4 in C minor, just as it did in the 19th century. (College Costs Are Rising Amid a Prestige Chase - NYTimes.com)(11 mar 2012)
"Here I am an old man in a long nightgown making muffled noises at people who may be no worse than I am."(09 mar 2012)
We start out with Chaos, which is where all theogonies start, and which I like to think of as a sea of white noise—totally random broadband static. And for reasons that we don’t really understand, certain polarities begin to coalesce from this—Day, Night, Darkness, Light, Earth, Sea. Personally, I like to think of these as crystals—not in the hippy-dippy Californian sense, but in the hardass technical sense of resonators, that received certain channels buried in the static of Chaos. At some point, out of certain incestuous couplings among such entities, you get Titans. And it’s arguably kind of interesting to note that the Titans provide really the full complement of basic gods—you’ve got the sun god, Hyperion, and an ocean god, Oceanus, and so on. But they all get overthrown in a power struggle called the Titanomachia and replaced with new gods like Apollo and Poseidon, who end up filling the same slots in the organizational chart, as it were. Which is kind of interesting in that it seems to tie in with what I was saying about the same entities or patterns persisting through time, but casting slightly different shaped shadows for different people. Anyway, so now we have the Gods of Olympus as we normally think of them: Zeus, Hera, and so on(06 mar 2012)
“Dramatic demonstrations of arc lights began in the late 1870s and seemed to offer visible proof of coming changes. The Brooklyn Bridge or a skyscraper, when studded with electric lights, took on an entirely new appearance,” Nye wrote. “As these changes filled the urban night, a shimmering new world came into being. The electrified urban landscape emerged as another avatar of the sublime.”(04 mar 2012)
“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia…could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”
I have been operating as if it's some kind of failure to leave a promising idea unarticulated — and as though an idea doesn't quite count as an idea until it's reified in words. But could there be more value in the haze?(26 feb 2012)
First, many intellectual conversations between people who lack this skill are are random walks through topic space. Each tangential leap is potentially useful for mining relevant evidence from each person’s mind… but in conversations exploring an important central thesis it is good to treat the tangents as objects pushed onto a stack in the course of linear conversation. When you go to far afield with a tangent you need the presence of mind to notice that D was inspired by C which was inspired by B, which was profoundly relevant to the pragmatically important question of A. Stepping back to C or B or even A is frequently called for in important conversations but requires contextual mindfulness.
Skill: negotiation - deliberately reaching a mutually beneficial trade or agreement, even in situations of slight power imbalance. Important for rationalists who aim at earning money as an instrumental goal.
(At the 5-second level a key component of this is learning to say “no”, being able to overcome one’s agreeableness as the default decision.)
“…Now there are huge implications from the fact that the human mind is put together this way. One implication is that people who create things like cash registers, which make dishonest behavior hard to accomplish, are some of the effective saints of our civilization because, as [B. F.] Skinner so well knew, bad behavior is intensely habit-forming when it is rewarded.
“And so the cash register was a great moral instrument when it was created. And, by the way, Patterson, the great evangelist of the cash register, knew that from his own experience. He had a little store, and his employees were stealing him blind, so that he never made any money. Then people sold him a couple of cash registers, and his store went to profit immediately.
“He promptly closed the store and went into the cash register business, creating what became the mighty National Cash Register Company, one of the glories of its time.”(25 feb 2012)
is it possible that DFW is better because he writes more like he talks, and talking sounds better than writing?(20 feb 2012)
There’s the evolutionary version of this question, of course (something like, “Why did we evolve to have some common tubes between the two systems?”) There usually aren’t good answers to that sort of specific question, though… only halfway-decent hypotheses. Remember, in science we have to compare our favorite hypotheses to the natural world… and it’s really, really hard to do that when you’re talking about something that happened millions of years ago, over millions of years, in soft-tissue. (Why does urination occur in the sex organs?: askscience)(18 feb 2012)
I hope my handwriting, etc. do not give the impression I am just a crank or circle-squarer. My position here is Assist. Prof. of Math. My best known work is in game theory (reprint sent separately). (John Nash’s Letter to the NSA «Turing’s Invisible Hand)(18 feb 2012)
there would seem to be no relationship fantasy quite as excitingly ego-satisfying as this idea of having a muse — I mean give me a fucking break(17 feb 2012)
this "easy challenge" that I talk about stephen dedalus having may well be better described as "tilting at windmills," which on the one hand means something like "foolishly attempting to do the impossible," but seems to really be about — and here's the relevant part — fighting imaginary giants: conceiving yourself to be the hero in a grand battle when something closer to the opposite is true(17 feb 2012)
trying to navigate the awful geometry of the fragments I've laid down(08 feb 2012)
the way dferr power-pauses after making a statement(06 feb 2012)
how close imaginative empathy is to vanity(06 feb 2012)
like drinking a beer in the backseat of a car(04 feb 2012)
How about a ciphertext that could be decrypted with two keys, each yielding a different readable plaintext?(31 jan 2012)
"…and other emotional basis vectors of the space which is 'Bach'."
We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff.(31 jan 2012)
"you're literally my media dumping ground"(30 jan 2012)
First-time specs rarely sell for much higher than the low sixes. After that, a writer usually finds himself jobbing around town on low-paying rewrite and polishing gigs on existing studio projects. It could be years before a young writer, hot off the sale of a spec script, ever cracks mid-sixes on his next payday. And he may even sell multiple specs, never to see a single one made. (Amazon studios | Hacker News)(22 jan 2012)
Dear Advertisers, I am disgusted with the way old people are depicted on television. We are not all vibrant, fun-loving sex maniacs. Many of us are bitter, resentful individuals who remember the good old days when entertainment was bland and inoffensive. The following is a list of words I never want to hear on television again. Number one: bra. Number two: horny. Number three: family jewels. — Grampa Simpson, "Bart the General"(21 jan 2012)
that kid from the plane and his "nutrition for dummies" book(18 jan 2012)
Writing describes a range of activities, like farming. Plowing virgin fields—writing new scenes—demands freshness, but there’s also polishing to be done, fact-checking, character-autobiography writing, realigning the text after you’ve made a late decision that affects earlier passages—that kind of work can be done in the fifth, sixth, and seventh hours. Sometimes, at any hour, you can receive a gift—something that’s really tight and animate and so interesting that I forget the time until my long-suffering wife begins to drop noisy hints
Wired: If that’s the case, how useful is the Turing test?
Norvig: I don’t like it that much, in part because I don’t care about the philosophy angle. I want to build something useful. We already know how to make humans; I made two of them.(14 jan 2012)
Computer scientist Edgar Dykstra said that the question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim(14 jan 2012)
The practice of showcasing consumer brands in films began as an informal barter system, dating as far back as 1896, when a representative for the Lever brothers (now Unilever), got two cases of Sunlight soap into a Lumière film. Those sorts of arrangements—a cereal box on screen in exchange for breakfasts in the studio cafeteria—continued in Hollywood, and still do, as prop masters and costume designers seek out supplies at minimal or no cost. But as an industry, product placement really took off in the ‘80, with the notable appearance of Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces in E.T. The candy lured the alien out of his hiding place, and sales rose 65 percent after the movie’s release.(12 jan 2012)
More accurate ways of describing Brockman would be to say that he is a "cultural impresario" or, as his friend Stewart Brand puts it, an "intellectual enzyme". (Brand goes on helpfully to explain that an enzyme is "a biological catalyst - an adroit enabler of otherwise impossible things".)(12 jan 2012)
It is a limitation of your brain.
Control of your extraocular muscles (the ones that move your eyes) is extremely complicated. There are two main pathways that control the two things you mention.
The smooth pursuit pathway uses visual input to track objects and follow them. Because it relies on visual input, you cannot force yourself to make smooth movements with your eyes. The voluntary eye movements use…
The saccadic pathway, which makes darting movements. These position your eyes very quickly.
Cars are going past on the road outside the coffee shop here, and I can follow them as they pass in one smooth motion, left-to-right or whatever.
However, if I try and run my eyes along the edge of the pavement, or the road lines, they jump in little increments along the lines. This is presumably because the path I’m trying to look along is not that of a moving object, but what’s stopping me from doing this? Is it a limitation of my eyes or my brain?
starting a sentence with "Look," adds about eleven years to your perceived age-'n-maturity(07 jan 2012)
"I can see that we're in violent agreement… so I'm going to shut down the conversation."(05 jan 2012)
allocentric conversations & affairs — "don't worry about me", particularly in those moments where their instinct to pendulum the one-sidedness kicks in.(05 jan 2012)
An emotion can be infectious, a tune catchy, a habit contagious. “From look to look, contagious through the crowd / The panic runs,” wrote the poet James Thomson in 1730. Lust, likewise, according to Milton: “Eve, whose eye darted contagious fire.” (What Defines a Meme? | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine)(03 jan 2012)
a strikingly effective meme vehicle, in the sense neatly explained by the philosopher Daniel Dennett: “A wagon with spoked wheels carries not only grain or freight from place to place; it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels from mind to mind.” (What Defines a Meme? | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine)(03 jan 2012)
those colgate snippets and “straining for formality”(03 jan 2012)
“All that wasted steam power” [re Yellowstone] as an awfully American thing to say.(02 jan 2012)
It is often mistakenly thought that the Authorized Version is out of copyright. In fact, the Authorized Version is actually under United Kingdom Crown Copyright, though this is not enforced outside the United Kingdom. The rights to the Authorized Version are held by the British Crown under perpetual Crown copyright. Publishers are licensed to reproduce the Authorized Version under letters patent. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the letters patent are held by the Queen’s Printer, and in Scotland by the Scottish Bible Board. The office of Queen’s Printer has been associated with the right to reproduce the Bible for centuries, the earliest known reference coming in 1577. In the 18th century all surviving interests in the monopoly were bought out by John Baskett. The Baskett rights descended through a number of printers and, in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the Queen’s Printer is now Cambridge University Press, who inherited the right when they took over the firm of Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1990.[135]
Other royal charters of similar antiquity grant Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press the right to produce the Authorized Version independently of the Queen’s Printer. In Scotland the Authorized Version is published by Collins under licence from the Scottish Bible Board. The terms of the letters patent prohibit any other than the holders, or those authorized by the holders, from printing, publishing or importing the Authorized Version into the United Kingdom. The protection that the Authorized Version, and also the Book of Common Prayer, enjoy is the last remnant of the time when the Crown held a monopoly over all printing and publishing in the United Kingdom.[135]
In a period of rapid linguistic change the translators avoided contemporary idioms, tending instead towards forms that were already slightly archaic, like verily and it came to pass.[122] The pronouns thou/thee and you are consistently used as singular and plural respectively, even though by this time you was often found as the singular in general English usage, especially when addressing a social superior (as is evidenced, for example, in Shakespeare).[123] For the possessive of the third person pronoun, the word its, first recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1598, is avoided.[124] The older his is usually employed, as for example at Matthew 5:13: “if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?”;[124] in other places of it, thereof or bare it are found.[125] Another sign of linguistic conservativism is the invariable use of -eth for the third person singular present form of the verb, as at Matthew 2:13: “the Angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dreame”. The rival ending -(e)s, as found in present-day English, was already widely used by this time (for example, it predominates over -eth in the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe).[126] Furthermore, the translators preferred which in preference to who or whom as the relative pronoun for persons, as in Genesis 13:5: “And Lot also which went with Abram, had flocks and heards, & tents”[127] although who(m) is also found (Authorized King James Version - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(02 jan 2012)
The task of translation was undertaken by 47 scholars, although 54 were originally approved.[10] All were members of the Church of England and all except Sir Henry Savile were clergy.[44] The scholars worked in six committees, two based in each of the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and Westminster. The committees included scholars with Puritan sympathies, as well as High Churchmen. Forty unbound copies of the 1602 edition of the Bishops’ Bible were specially printed so that the agreed changes of each committee could be recorded in the margins.[45] The committees worked on certain parts separately and the drafts produced by each committee were then compared and revised for harmony with each other.[46] The scholars were not paid directly for their translation work, instead a circular letter was sent to bishops encouraging them to consider the translators for appointment to well paid livings as these fell vacant.[44] Several were supported by the various colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, while others were promoted to bishoprics, deaneries and prebends through royal patronage. (Authorized King James Version - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(02 jan 2012)
According to independent cartographers I spoke with, the big mapmaking corporations of the world employ type-positioning software, placing their map labels (names of cities, rivers, etc.) according to an algorithm. For example, preferred placement for city labels is generally to the upper right of the dot that indicates location. But if this spot is already occupied—by the label for a river, say, or by a state boundary line—the city label might be shifted over a few millimeters. Sometimes a town might get deleted entirely in favor of a highway shield or a time zone marker. The result is a rough draft of label placement, still in need of human refinement. Post-computer editing decisions are frequently outsourced—sometimes to India, where teams of cheap workers will hunt for obvious errors and messy label overlaps. The overall goal is often a quick and dirty turnaround, with cost and speed trumping excellence and elegance.
By contrast, David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It’s the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.
How do they do the announcements in eg hockey video games?(31 dec 2011)
Muir: "…to render myself more treewise and sequoiacal."(30 dec 2011)
When I was ten I would be transported by certain books—Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, Susan Cooper’s fantasy novels, Isaac Asimov—and burn to do to readers what had just been done to me. Sometimes that burning prompted me
For all her high-minded business acumen, as an artist Swift is primarily interested in the emotional life of 15-year-olds: the time of dances and dates with guys you don’t like, humiliating crying jags about guys who don’t like you, and those few transcendent experiences when a girl’s and a boy’s feelings finally line up. You can’t go anywhere without your best friend. You still tell your mom everything. Real sexuality hasn’t kicked in yet. Swift won’t reveal anything on that topic herself. “I feel like whatever you say about whether you do or don’t, it makes people picture you naked,” she says, self-assuredly. “And as much as possible, I’m going to avoid that. It’s self-preservation, really.”
Says Conley: “Within psychology, perspectives that draw upon adaptively evolved mechanisms are typically utilized to explain gender differences in sexuality. That is, the behaviors we see today are presumed to be relics of our evolutionary past. The research reviewed suggests that these gender differences are in fact rooted in much more mundane causes: stigma against women for expressing sexual desires; women’s socialization to attend to other’s needs rather than their own; and, more broadly, a double standard that dictates (different sets of) appropriate sexual behaviors for men and women.”
More than most players, enforcers gaze ahead on the schedule. They know that the game in Calgary will entail a rematch of a fight lost last time. That game against Edmonton will need an answer for the cheap shot laid on a star player.
“I’ve had times where, going into a game, I know I’m going to get into a fight,” the Chicago Blackhawks enforcer John Scott said. “Just the thought of getting into a fight, I just lay there, awake. ‘O.K., what am I going to do?’ I’m nervous. I’ve got butterflies in my stomach. I’ll probably get one hour of sleep. It’s exciting, nerve-racking and terrifying all at the same time.”
Such adoration is not unusual. The enforcer, sometimes mocked as a goon or euphemized as a tough guy, may be hockey’s favorite archetype. Enforcers are seen as working-class superheroes — understated types with an alter ego willing to do the sport’s most dangerous work to protect others. And they are underdogs, men who otherwise might have no business in the game.
jenny's usefully annoying way of continuing to ask questions, even if you think you've given a pretty well solid answer(22 dec 2011)
This overlooks much history and totally misconstrues the technology. The first cables carried telegraphy, which is as purely digital as anything that goes on inside your computer. The cables were designed that way because the hackers of a century and a half ago understood perfectly well why digital was better. A single bit of code passing down a wire from Porthcurno to the Azores was apt to be in sorry shape by the time it arrived, but precisely because it was a bit, it could easily be abstracted from the noise, then recognized, regenerated, and transmitted anew.
Oddly enough, this debate comes at a time when stand-alone computers are seeming less and less significant and the Internet more so. Whether or not you agree that “the network is the computer,” a phrase Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems recently coined, you can’t dispute that moving information around seems to have much broader appeal than processing it. Many more people are interested in email and the Web than were interested in databases and spreadsheets.
One cannot merely pay the cable out at the same speed as the ship moves forward. If the bottom is sloping down and away from the ship as the ship proceeds, it is necessary to pay the cable out faster. If the bottom is sloping up toward the ship, the cable must come out more slowly . Such calculations are greatly complicated by the fact that the cable is stretched out far behind the ship - the distance between the ship and the cable’s contact point on the bottom of the ocean can be more than 30 kilometers, and the maximum depth at which (for example) KDD cable can be laid is 8,000 meters. Insofar as the shape of the bottom affects what the ship ought to be doing, it’s not the shape of the bottom directly below the ship that is relevant, but the shape of the bottom wherever the contact point happens to be located, which is by no means a straightforward calculation. Of course, the ship is heaving up and down on the ocean and probably being shoved around by wind and currents while all this is happening, and there is also the possibility of ocean currents that may move the cable to and fro during its descent.
It is not, in other words, a seat-of-the-pants kind of deal; the skipper can’t just sit up on the bridge, eyeballing a chart, and twiddling a few controls according to his intuition. In practice, the only way to ensure that the cable ends up where it is supposed to is to calculate the whole thing ahead of time. Just as aeronautical engineers create numerical simulations of hypothetical airplanes to test their coefficient of drag, so do the slack control wizards of Cable & Wireless Marine use numerical simulation techniques to model the catenary curve adopted by the cable as it stretches between ship and contact point. In combination with their detailed data on the shape of the ocean floor, this enables them to figure out, in advance, exactly what the ship should do when. All of it is boiled down into a set of instructions that is turned over to the master of the cable ship: at such and such a point, increase speed to x knots and reduce cable tension to y tons and change payout speed to z meters per second, and so on and so forth, all the way from Porthcurno to Miura.”
“What drives the housing cycle up, inevitably drives the market down as well. Builders in the multi-unit segment are currently responding to elevated home prices and robust pre-construction sales. Anecdotal evidence suggests the vast majority of pre-construction sales are to investors who intend to sell the units on completion or rent them out. As these condos in the construction pipeline are completed, this inventory of units will be dumped on to the rental and/or re-sale market just as sales momentum and housing demand ebbs. Our estimates indicate there will not be enough renters in Toronto to occupy these units as they are completed. As a result, some investors will be left holding vacant units. Since most investors are unlikely to hold onto negative-carry investments without a reasonable prospect of price appreciation; this will put downward pressure on home prices. We have already seen this dynamic play out in some smaller markets on Canada’s west coast where prices have corrected 15 per cent.” (Daily Mix - The Globe and Mail)(22 dec 2011)
Some wisdom from William James:
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund.
For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain.
No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.
As a final practical maxim, relative to these habits of the will, we may, then, offer something like this: Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and…
Then modems came along and turned the tables. Modems are a digital hack on an analog technology, of course; they take the digits from your computer and convert them into a complicated analog waveform that can be transmitted down existing wires. The roar of white noise that you hear when you listen in on a modem transmission is exactly what Bell was originally aiming for with his reeds. Modems, and everything that has ensued from them, like the World Wide Web, are just the latest example of a pattern that was established by Kelvin 140 years ago, namely, hacking existing wires by inventing new stuff to put on the ends of them.
Electrical oscillations in a wire follow the same rules as acoustical ones in the air, so a wire can carry exactly the same kind of cacophony, with the same results. Instead of using piano strings, Bell and others were using a set of metal reeds like the ones in a harmonica, each tuned to vibrate at a different frequency. They electrified the reeds in such a way that they generated not only acoustical vibrations but corresponding electrical ones. They sought to combine the electrical vibrations of all these reeds into one complicated waveform and feed it into one end of a cable. At the far end of the cable, they would feed the signal into an identical set of reeds. Each reed would vibrate in sympathy only with its counterpart on the other end of the wire, and by recording the pattern of vibrations exhibited by that reed, one could extract a Morse code message independent of the other messages being transmitted on the other reeds. For the price of one wire, you could send many simultaneous coded messages and have them all sort themselves out on the other end.
To make a long story short, it didn’t work. But it did raise an interesting question. If you could take vibrations at one frequency and combine them with vibrations at another frequency, and another, and another, to make a complicated waveform, and if that waveform could be transmitted to the other end of a submarine cable intact, then there was no reason in principle why the complex waveform known as the human voice couldn’t be transmitted in the same way. The only difference would be that the waves in this case were merely literal representations of sound waves, rather than Morse code sequences transmitted at different frequencies. It was, in other words, an analog hack on a digital technology.
We have all been raised to think of the telephone as a vast improvement on the telegraph, as the steamship was to the sailing ship or the electric lightbulb to the candle, but from a hacker tourist’s point of view, it begins to seem like a lamentable wrong turn. Until Bell, all telegraphy was digital. The multiplexing system he worked on was purely digital in concept even if it did make use of some analog properties of matter (as indeed all digital equipment does). But when his multiplexing scheme went sour, he suddenly went analog on us.
Bell was one of a few researchers pursuing a hack based on the phenomenon of resonance. If you open the lid of a grand piano, step on the sustain pedal, and sing a note into it, such as a middle C, the strings for the piano’s C keys will vibrate sympathetically, while the D strings will remain still. If you sing a D, the D strings vibrate and the C strings don’t. Each string resonates only at the frequency to which it has been tuned and is deaf to other frequencies.
If you were to hum out a Morse code pattern of dots and dashes, all at middle C, a deaf observer watching the strings would notice a corresponding pattern of vibrations. If, at the same time, a second person was standing next to you humming an entirely different sequence of dots and dashes, but all on the musical tone of D, then a second deaf observer, watching the D strings, would be able to read that message, and so on for all the other tones on the scale. There would be no interference between the messages; each would come through as clearly as if it were the only message being sent. But anyone who wasn’t deaf would hear a cacophony of noise as all the message senders sang in different rhythms, on different notes. If you took this to an extreme, built a special piano with strings tuned as close to each other as possible, and trained the message senders to hum Morse code as fast as possible, the sound would merge into an insane roar of white noise.
One of the better explanations in the piece(18 dec 2011)
As you may have figured out by this point, submarine cables are an incredible pain in the ass to build, install, and operate. Hooking stuff up to the ends of them is easy by comparison. So it has always been the case that cables get laid first and then people begin trying to think of new ways to use them. Once a cable is in place, it tends to be treated not as a technological artifact but almost as if it were some naturally occurring mineral formation that might be exploited in any number of different ways.
Evans is a thoroughly pleasant middle-aged fellow, a former merchant marine captain, who seemed just a bit taken aback that anyone would care about the minute details of what he and his staff do for a living. A large part of being a hacker tourist is convincing people that you are really interested in the nitty-gritty and not just looking for a quick, painless sound bite or two; once this is accomplished, they always warm to the task, and Captain Evans was no exception
This feat is achieved by means of a collection of extremely precise analog machinery. The heart of the system is another polished box that contains a vibrating reed, electromagnetically driven, thrumming along at 30 cycles per second, generating the clock pulses that keep all the other machines turning over at the right pace. The reed is as precise as such a thing can be, but over time it is bound to drift and get out of sync with the other vibrating reeds in the other stations.
In order to control this tendency, a pair of identical pendulum clocks hang next to each other on the wall above. These clocks feed steady, one-second timing pulses into the box housing the reed. The reed, in turn, is driving a motor that is geared so that it should turn over at one revolution per second, generating a pulse with each revolution. If the frequency of the reed’s vibration begins to drift, the motor’s speed will drift along with it, and the pulse will come a bit too early or a bit too late. But these pulses are being compared with the steady one-second pulses generated by the double pendulum clock, and any difference between them is detected by a feedback system that can slightly speed up or slow down the vibration of the reed in order to correct the error. The result is a clock so steady that once one of them is set up in, say, London, and another is set up in, say, Cape Town, the machinery in those two cities will remain synched with each other indefinitely.
This is precisely the same function that is performed by the quartz clock chip at the heart of any modern computing device. The job performed by the regenerator/retransmitter is also perfectly recognizable to any modern digitally minded hacker tourist: it is an analog-to-digital converter. The analog voltages come down the cable into the device, the circuitry in the box decides whether the signal is a dot or a dash (or if you prefer, a 1 or a 0), and then an electromagnet physically moves one way or the other, depending on whether it’s a dot or a dash. At that moment, the device is strictly digital. The electromagnet, by moving, then closes a switch that generates a new pulse of analog voltage that moves on down the cable. The hacker tourist, who has spent much of his life messing around with invisible, ineffable bits, can hardly fail to be fascinated when staring into the guts of a machine built in 1927, steadily hammering out bits through an electromechanical process that can be seen and even touched.
As I started to realize, and as John Worrall and many other cable-industry professionals subsequently told me, there have been new technologies but no new ideas since the turn of the century. Alas for Internet chauvinists who sneer at older, “analog” technology, this rule applies to the transmission of digital bits down wires, across long distances. We’ve been doing it ever since Morse sent “What hath God wrought!” from Washington to Baltimore.
The question naturally arises: How does one go about manufacturing a hollow glass tube thinner than a hair? More to the point, how did they do it 100 years ago? After all, as Worrall pointed out, they needed to be able to repair these machines when they were posted out on Ascension Island. The answer is straightforward and technically sweet: you take a much thicker glass tube, heat it over a Bunsen burner until it glows and softens, and then pull sharply on both ends. It forms a long, thin tendril, like a string of melted cheese stretching away from a piece of pizza. Amazingly, it does not close up into a solid glass fiber, but remains a tube no matter how thin it gets.
Exactly the same trick is used to create the glass fibers that run down the center of FLAG and other modern submarine cables: an ingot of very pure glass is heated until it glows, and then it is stretched. The only difference is that these are solid fibers rather than tubes, and, of course, it’s all done using machines that assure a consistent result.
alex finds the hand-to-hand combat of mi4 "really muddy"… "and the only time I could really understand the geography of the fight…"(16 dec 2011)
imagine being a scientist and being tapped to work on the A-bomb; and giving the greatest demo in the history of the world(11 dec 2011)
Over long (intercontinental) distances, the difference averages out to about 1 percent, so you might need a 2,525-kilometer cable to go from Songkhla to Lan Tao. The extra 1 percent is slack, in the sense that if you grabbed the ends and pulled the cable infinitely tight (bar tight, as they say in the business), it would theoretically straighten out and you would have an extra 25 kilometers. This slack is ideally molded into the contour of the seafloor as tightly as a shadow, running straight and true along the surveyed course
you know how I fix hiccups? I concentrate.(10 dec 2011)
the difference between ghostwriting and speechwriting — where in the latter case the performance, being what it is, earns the speaker the distinction of his own kind of authorship, where the other thing is a lie.(10 dec 2011)
drew’s idea of fun: Point Break and teddy grahams(10 dec 2011)
"who is also a valuable capital asset clues up about their"(08 dec 2011)
The first time a cable-savvy person uses the word slack in your presence, you’ll be tempted to assume he is using it in the loose, figurative way - as a layperson uses it. After the eightieth or ninetieth time, and after the cable guy has spent a while talking about the seemingly paradoxical notion of slack control and extolling the sophistication of his ship’s slack control systems and his computer’s slack numerical-simulation software, you begin to understand that slack plays as pivotal a role in a cable lay as, say, thrust does in a moon mission.
He who masters slack in all of its fiendish complexity stands astride the cable world like a colossus; he who is clueless about slack either snaps his cable in the middle of the ocean or piles it in a snarl on the ocean floor - which is precisely what early 19th-century cable layers spent most of their time doing.
The talent wars actually play out on a much larger stage. The fight over the mind of a talented developer begins long before he or she even thinks about taking a paying job. Sometimes the fight begins in middle school. The reason is that the software industry, unlike almost any other, can get talent into its pipeline extremely early, by way of dominant programming languages, development environments, data and tools. A talented high-school kid who starts hacking away at an iPhone app at 14 is likely to stay in orbit around Apple for his/her entire career. A kid whose first programming stunt is a Google Maps mashup using other Google tools and APIs, is just as likely to stay in orbit around Google. A little known fact about Google, for instance, is that its investment in Python (one of the three languages the company uses for its work) was in part a strategic bet on an under-valued language, when it noticed that other companies were missing the growing talent pool in Python.(07 dec 2011)
In keeping with his general practice of using subtlety where moronic brute force had failed, Kelvin replaced the soggy rope with a piano wire, which in turn enabled him to replace the heavy weight with a much smaller one. This idea might seem obvious to us now, but it was apparently quite the brainstorm. The tension in the wire was so light that a single sailor could reel it in by turning a spoked wooden wheel.
At the time, depths were sounded by heaving a lead-weighted rope over the side of the ship and letting it pay out until it hit bottom. So far, so easy, but hauling thousands of meters of soggy rope, plus a lead weight, back onto the ship required the efforts of several sailors and took a long time. The US Navy ameliorated the problem by rigging it so that the weight could be detached and simply discarded on the bottom, but this only replaced one problem with another one in that a separate weight had to be carried for each sounding. Either way, the job was a mess and could be done only rarely. This probably explains why ships were constantly running aground in those days, leading to a relentless, ongoing massacre of crew and passengers compared to which today’s problem of bombs and airliners is like a Sunday stroll through Disney World.
Second, the wealthy disproportionately consume certain specialized services like dermatological services. Very high demand for these services has increased compensation for them dramatically, which has drawn doctors away from becoming GPs and being more likely to practice in those areas. This creates a shortage of GPs, which drives up costs across the board.(06 dec 2011)
"How to Write a Good Admissions Essay (to Graduate School)"(05 dec 2011)
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. THOMAS MANN(03 dec 2011)
"Board games are found as artifacts of the earliest Egyptian dynasties, so they don't truly fall within the two-thousand-year limit, but they have undergone a rapid 'adaptive radiation' in the last millenium."(02 dec 2011)
The trick here is that the ritual does not energize his spirit with the soaring possibilities [and attendant responsibilities] of being a man in this society. Rather, the grim and pathetic spectacle of one’s own father getting drunk before us, less verbally and physically coherent until he shouts “leave me!” hilariously, it’s almost a mournful entree to adulthood – this is the world of adults, and this is the pathetic end – there is no wisdom, or effort passed, and the only ordeal is watching the old god die. The metaphor is that adulthood is watching our heroes self-immolate, or have them show us their true, pathetic, boozy colours – sapping the last of our youthful outlook and vitality. (Moccasin Telegraph)(02 dec 2011)
Suppose people
did employ strictly formal inferential rules, operating on substantive
premises. Then if we gave experimental subjects two problems which differ in
substance but can be solved by applying the same deductive rule, they should do
equally well at both problems; performance should be content-neutral. But it’s
easy to find pairs of problems where this isn’t the case, and to show that the
difference isn’t due to (say) one topic being more familiar and so easier to
apply known rules of logic to; the crucial difference seems to be the
subject-matter of the problems. For instance, people correctly apply the rule
of inference known as modus ponens to problems when they are couched
as being about catching people cheating on social conventions, even if the
conventions are very foreign to them, but flub logically-equivalent problems
about abstract rules. Pragmatic reasoning schemata, then, are a kind of hybrid
of formal and substantive information —- “If you’re looking for someone
cheating on rule thus-and-such, then do this-and-so” —- and their use would
explain why people are at once successful in negotiating daily life and bad at
reasoning abstractly or in unfamiliar contexts. This would also explain why
logic courses rarely do much to make people reason better, while training in
substantive areas does help people think straight —- about those subjects. (Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett and Thagard, Induction)(02 dec 2011)
Or, as Ernest
Gellner put it in Legitimation of Belief, reductionism is “the
view that everything in this world is really something else, and that the
something else is always in the end unedifying. So lucidly formulated, one can
see that this is a luminously true and certain idea.” (John Holland, Emergence)(02 dec 2011)
The problem of emergence is, roughly speaking —- and half the trouble with
it is that everything we say about it is only rough —- the flip side of the
problem of building blocks. Instead of asking how we, or other creatures,
carve Nature at the joints, we ask why Nature has those particular joints, or
even has joints at all, and is not (to continue with the metaphor) a single
undifferentiated hunk of inharmoniously quivering meat, a fleshy compound of
chaos and ancient night. (John Holland, Emergence)(02 dec 2011)
this "write what you would want to read" business is complicated by the fact that you know more than your reader(02 dec 2011)
personal statements and the difference between sharm's and spohd's and the "basketball grad school" example, contrasting something like:
It's a fast-paced game that combines the cerebral and physical, and has this wonderful back-and-forth, and requires both individual performance and team chemistry, etc.
with:
When I'm in the low post and I'm trying to coordinate with the 3-man in the high post, and we've got a defender between us, and I have to model what the defender thinks I think my teammate is going to do… I have to be well-conditioned enough to win the offensive board if there's a shot and aware enough to know (from having practiced baby-hooks around the world every day at 6pm) where exactly the rim is behind my back, so that if I get the ball I can turn and shoot without giving up a tempo.
because the latter shows that you're a basketball player and you belong at basketball grad school.(30 nov 2011)
For the most part, the duct installation is a simple cut-and-cover operation, right down the median strip. But the median is crossed frequently by nicely paved, heavily trafficked U-turn routes. To cut or block one of these would be unthinkable, since no journey in Egypt is complete without numerous U-turns. It is therefore necessary to bore a horizontal tunnel under each one, run a 600-mm steel pipe down the tunnel, and finally thread the ducts through it. The tunnels are bored by laborers operating big manually powered augers. Under a sign reading Civil Works: Fiberoptic Link around the Globe, the men had left their street clothes carefully wrapped up in plastic bags, on the shoulder of the road. They had kicked off their shoes and changed into the traditional, loose, ankle-length garment. One by one, they disappeared into a tunnel barely big enough to lie down in, carrying empty baskets, then returned a few minutes later with baskets full of dirt, looking like extras in some new Hollywood costume drama: The Ten Commandments Meets the Great Escape.
mw3's leveling system as a "genius way of tricking you up the learning curve" (making you play a certain amt & way before you can play with "your" configuration)(29 nov 2011)
this thing where a girl in a ponytail drinks a beer(28 nov 2011)
Euclid’s pons asinorum (fools bridge) — think about this in the context of those interactive programming tutors that start easy and then suddenly fall off a cliff(28 nov 2011)
If you ask the league to see the footage that was taken from on high to show the entire field and what all 22 players did on every play, the response will be emphatic. “NO ONE gets that,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy wrote in an email. This footage, added fellow league spokesman Greg Aiello, “is regarded at this point as proprietary NFL coaching information.”
For decades, NFL TV broadcasts have relied most heavily on one view: the shot from a sideline camera that follows the progress of the ball. Anyone who wants to analyze the game, however, prefers to see the pulled-back camera angle known as the “All 22.”
While this shot makes the players look like stick figures, it allows students of the game to see things that are invisible to TV watchers: like what routes the receivers ran, how the defense aligned itself and who made blocks past the line of scrimmage.
By distributing this footage only to NFL teams, and rationing it out carefully to its TV partners and on its web site, the NFL has created a paradox. The most-watched sport in the U.S. is also arguably the least understood. “I don’t think you can get a full understanding without watching the entirety of the game,” says former head coach Bill Parcells. The zoomed-in footage on TV broadcasts, he says, only shows a “fragment” of what happens on the field.
Lisa's birthday song was simultaneously a satire of sentimentality (think of the way the neighbors looked up wide-eyed at the sound) and sentimental itself, and that's why it worked(22 nov 2011)
Without those in themselves unamiable characteristics of unsociability from whence opposition springs-characteristics each man must find in his own selfish pretensions-all talents would remain hidden, unborn in an Arcadian shepherd’s life, with all its concord, contentment, and mutual affection. Men, good-natured as the sheep they herd, would hardly reach a higher worth than their beasts; they would not fill the empty place in creation by achieving their end, which is rational nature. Thanks be to Nature, then, for the incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to rule! Without them, all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep, undeveloped. Man wishes concord; but Nature knows better what is good for the race; she wills discord. He wishes to live comfortably and pleasantly; Nature wills that he should be plunged from sloth and passive contentment into labor and trouble, in order that he may find means of extricating himself from them. The natural urges to this, the sources of unsociableness and mutual opposition from which so many evils arise, drive men to new exertions of their forces and thus to the manifold development of their capacities. They thereby perhaps show the ordering of a wise Creator and not the hand of an evil spirit, who bungled in his great work or spoiled it out of envy.(22 nov 2011)
Great new phrase: here’s two cents from the cheap seats.(21 nov 2011)
The rule of thumb for calculating revenue loss works like this: for every penny per minute that the long distance market will bear on a particular route, the loss of revenue, should FLAG be severed on that route, is about $3,000 a minute. So if calls on that route are a dime a minute, the damage is $30,000 a minute, and if calls are a dollar a minute, the damage is almost a third of a million dollars for every minute the cable is down. Upcoming advances in fiber bandwidth may push this figure, for some cables, past the million-dollar-a-minute mark.
In 1870, a new cable was laid between England and France, and Napoleon III used it to send a congratulatory message to Queen Victoria. Hours later, a French fisherman hauled the cable up into his boat, identified it as either the tail of a sea monster or a new species of gold-bearing seaweed, and cut off a chunk to take home. Thus was inaugurated an almost incredibly hostile relationship between the cable industry and fishermen.
That is to say, as long as the world lasts, the action and counteraction of wealth and poverty, the meeting, face to face, of rich and poor, is just as appointed and necessary a law of that world as the flow of stream to sea, or the interchange of power among the electric clouds: — “God is their maker.” (Unto this last: four essays on the first principles of political economy)(18 nov 2011)
And as into these two functions, requiring for their right exercise the highest intelligence, as well as patience, kindness, and tact, the merchant is bound to put all his energy, so for their just discharge he is bound, as soldier or physician is bound, to give up, if need be, his life, in such way as it may be demanded of him. Two main points he has in his providing function to maintain: first, his engagements (faithfulness to engagements being the real root of all possibilities, in commerce); and, secondly, the perfectness and purity of the thing provided; so that, rather than fail in any engagement, or consent to any deterioration, adulteration, or unjust and exorbitant price of that which he provides, he is bound to meet fearlessly any form of distress, poverty, or labour, which may, through maintenance of these points, come upon him. (Unto this last: four essays on the first principles of political economy)(18 nov 2011)
This they will find, eventually, they must give up doing. They must not cease to condemn selfishness; but they will have to discover a kind of commerce which is not exclusively selfish. Or, rather, they will have to discover that there never was, or can be, any other kind of commerce; that this which they have called commerce was not commerce at all, but cozening; and that a true merchant differs as much from a merchant according to laws of modern political economy, as the hero of the Excursion from Autolycus. They will find that commerce is an occupation which gentlemen will every day see more need to engage in, rather than in the businesses of talking to men, or slaying them; that, in true commerce, as in true preaching, or true fighting, it is necessary to admit the idea of occasional voluntary loss; — that sixpences have to be lost, as well as lives, under a sense of duty. that the market may have its martyrdoms as well as the pulpit; and trade its heroisms as well as war.
This inapplicability has been curiously manifested during the embarrassment caused by the late strikes of our workmen. Here occurs one of the simplest cases, in a pertinent and positive form, of the first vital problem which political economy has to deal with (the relation between employer and employed); and, at a severe crisis, when lives in multitudes and wealth in masses are at stake, the political economists are helpless — practically mute: no demonstrable solution of the difficulty can be given by them, such as may convince or calm the opposing parties. Obstinately the masters take one view of the matter. obstinately the operatives another; and no political science can set them at one.
Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusion of the science if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in then, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons. It might be shown, on that supposition, that it would be advantageous to roll the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables; and that when these results were effected, the re-insertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitution. The reasoning might be admirable, the conclusions true, and the science deficient only in applicability. Modern political economy stands on a precisely similar basis. Assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, it founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometrical figures with death’s-head and humeri, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular structures. I do not deny the truth of this theory: I simply deny its applicability to the present phase of the world.
"My topic is the shift from 'architect' to 'gardener', where 'architect' stands for 'someone who carries a full picture of the work before it is made', to 'gardener' standing for 'someone who plants seeds and waits to see exactly what will come up'. I will argue that today's composer are more frequently 'gardeners' than 'architects' and, further, that the 'composer as architect' metaphor was a transitory historical blip."(17 nov 2011)
pairing and the mutual diffusion of responsibility
also how the "this is why we pair" stuff is a bit naive. how it doesn't recognize that it's near impossible for two people to engage a problem to the same degree. if it's hard enough, only one person will ever really be in the micro bits at a time.(17 nov 2011)
In 1967 Martin Luther King wrote: "If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can't be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be be the best little shrub on the side of the hill."(15 nov 2011)
Levy: Two years ago, you bought Zappos. Was that an attempt to absorb their so-called culture of happiness and customer service?
Bezos: No, no, no. We like their unique culture, but we don’t want that culture at Amazon. We like our culture, too. Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants. And so we use all of our customer service information to find the root cause of any customer contact. What went wrong? Why did that person have to call? Why aren’t they spending that time talking to their family instead of talking to us? How do we fix it? Zappos takes a completely different approach. You call them and ask them for a pizza, and they’ll get out the Yellow Pages for you.
Levy: So where’s the synergy?
Bezos: It’s on the back end. Amazon has a huge shoe business. Zappos has a huge shoe business. Zappos may have the size-8 customer, and we have the size-8 shoe. Having one set of fulfillment services for these two very different front ends, you get to satisfy more customers more often, because you’re more likely to have their size and style and color and so on.
Eight years after Whitehouse fried the first, a second transatlantic cable was built to Lord Kelvin’s specifications with his patented mirror galvanometers at either end of it. He bought a 126-ton schooner yacht with the stupendous amount of money he made from his numerous cable-related patents, turned the ship into a floating luxury palace and laboratory for the invention of even more fantastically lucrative patents. He then spent the rest of his life tooling around the British Isles, Bay of Biscay, and western Mediterranean, frequently hosting Dukes and continental savants who all commented on the nerd-lord’s tendency to stop in the middle of polite conversation to scrawl out long skeins of equations on whatever piece of paper happened to be handy.
The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists, Burton to explorers, Robert E. Lee to generals, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes
He hadn't really known what to expect of America. But people here seem to do things—hangings included — with a blunt, blank efficiency that's admirable and disappointing at the same time. Like jumping fish, they go about difficult matters with bloodless ease. As if they were all born knowing things that other people must absorb, along with faery-tales and superstitions, from their families and villages. Maybe it is because most of them came over on ships.(12 nov 2011)
the psychology of reading a magazine article — how credibility flows from the lede(12 nov 2011)
seinfeld's halloween mask staple joke validates an observation that we didn't know was an observation (worthy of this kind of attention). that feeling of "yes!"(12 nov 2011)
it's the lack of feedback that makes speaking in those standup situations so tough(12 nov 2011)
how often people's code gets overwritten as a measure of contribution. or rather, since that would happen so often on a big project, focus on which code sticks around as a measure of excellence.(12 nov 2011)
what do I really mean by this "aesthetic grounds" business?(12 nov 2011)
mcphee's voiceless prose - prose you'd never be embarassed by(12 nov 2011)
how after a day of pairing I'll pick up the other guy's way of playing the keyboard (eg dg)(12 nov 2011)
"[at a party] everybody goes off, laughs and scratches for a bit, …"(10 nov 2011)
Within a day or two, the cable layers have established an official haunt: preferably a place equipped with a dartboard and a few other amenities very close to the waterfront so they can keep an eye on incoming traffic. There they can get a bite to eat or a drink and pay for it on the spot so that when their satellite phones ring or when a tugboat chugs into the bay, they can immediately dash off to work. These men work and play at completely erratic and unpredictable hours. They wear shorts and sandals and T-shirts and frequently sport tattoos and hence could easily be mistaken, at a glance, for vacationing sailors. But if you can get someone to turn down the volume on the jukebox, you can overhear them learnedly discoursing on flaw propagation in the crystalline structure of boron silicate glass or on seasonal variation of currents in the Pearl River estuary, or on what a pain in the ass it is to helm a large ship through the Suez Canal. Their conversation is filled with references to places like Tunisia, Diego Garcia, the North Sea, Porthcurno, and Penang.
One evening, after Handley and I had been buying each other drinks at Papa Doc’s for a while, he raised his glass and said, “To good times and great cable laying!” This toast, while no doubt uttered with a certain amount of irony, speaks volumes about cable professionals.
For most of them, good times and great cable laying are one and the same. They make their living doing the kind of work that automatically weeds out losers. Handley, for example, was a founding member of SEAL Team 2 who spent 59 months fighting in Vietnam, laid cables for the Navy for a few more years, and has done similar work in the civilian world ever since. In addition to being an expert diver, he has a master mariner’s license good up to 1,500 tons, which is not an easy thing to get or maintain. He does all his work on a laptop (he claims that it replaced 14 employees) and is as computer-literate as anyone I’ve known who isn’t a coder.
McPhee: Yes. It’s the whole book in the sense that I’ve reduced the notes to little things like airport codes. It means something to me and they relate to components of the story. On the 3-by-5 card there’s nothing more than one word, or half a word, but I know what it relates to. It relates to a whole body of stuff. Then I move the cards around to see where I’m going to find a good structure, a legitimate structure.
About that other point: There’s a big difference between riding a coal train through Kansas and Nebraska and trying to write. Writing is a suspension of life. I believe that so-called writer’s block is something that any writer is going to experience every day, but in a minor way. You break through some kind of membrane, and then you go into another world. Time really goes fast in there, but it is hard as can be to get there, and it frightens me. It frightens Joan Didion. She talks about the “low dread” she feels looking across the room at the door of her study. When she’s sitting somewhere, not writing, and she looks and sees that door, she experiences the low dread. Oh boy, do I know what that means. Getting past it is just a daily thing. It’s not there when you’re riding around in a train, but it sure is when you’re trying to write about riding around in a train.
Audience question: You do such a great job capturing people’s voices. I’ve always wondered: do you take notes by hand as you’re talking with them, or do you have recorders? How do you get such great phrases out of them?
McPhee: I’m just listening. Tons of stuff streams by, and I’m obviously not using 100 percent of it, but I do use a tape recorder if I have to. I never try to remember later what they said. There have been writers writing non-fiction who claim that they went home at night and wrote it down. I don’t do that. I scribble constantly. If I’m climbing up the North Cascades, I have a notebook in my hand, trying to keep my balance, and I’m scribbling, scribbling, because I much prefer to scribble in the notebooks than to transcribe endless tape.
But if you have 15 Appalachian geologists of the first rank standing around some outcrop, arguing about exotic terrains in Vermont, the language is unbelievable. I take out a tape recorder and put it on the outcrop. And then I go through the whole process with the thing with the foot treadle and all that to type up the taped stuff. But my first go is a notebook.
McPhee: I had a teacher in Princeton High School, Mrs. McKee, who had us write three pieces of writing a week. She had us get up and read them to the other kids, who would wad up paper and throw it at us when we were doing our reading.
We had a lot of fun in that class. We could write anything, fiction, non-fiction, poetry. Whatever it was, the structure had to be defended. You had to turn in, with each piece, a structural presentation, an outline, or a doodle of some sort that showed that you were thinking about the anatomy of the piece when you were writing it. And so, every single Princeton kid that I’ve ever taught has turned in every piece with a structural outline. But I picked that up in 10th grade, or 9th grade. She was a very influential teacher.
McPhee: What my work has in common is that it’s about real people in real places. I look for real people who are interesting that I can describe, and the places where they live and work, and so forth, and try to do a sketch of that. It’s led me into all kinds of different areas, but absolutely all of it has that in common. I had to label my course when I started teaching, and so it’s called creative non-fiction. What’s creative about non-fiction? Well, you can make a list of the things that, within the legitimacy of fact, you can do: You can arrange the structure, you can do flashbacks, you can do things that I feel are legitimate in factual writing. That’s what I try to get across to the students.
[Reads] “This pretty little stream is being disassembled in the name of gold. The result of the summer season of moving 40,000 cubic yards of material through a box, of varying 200,000 feet of bed rock, of scraping off the tundra and stuffing it up a hill, of making a muck-and-gravel hash out of what are now stream-side meadows of blue bells and lupine, daisies and arctic forget-me-nots, yellow poppies, and saxifrage, will be a peanut butter jar filled with flaky gold. Probably no one will actually use it. Investors will draw it into their world and lock it in an armored cellar while up here in these untraveled mountains, a machine-made moonscape will tell the tale.
“Am I disgusted? Manifestly not. Not from here, from now, from this perspective. I am too warmly, too subjectively caught up in what the Gelvins are doing. In the ecomilitia, bust me to private. This mine is a cork on the sea. Meanwhile (and, possibly, more seriously), the relationship between this father and son is as attractive as anything I’ve seen in Alaska — both of them self-reliant beyond the usual reach of the term, the characteristic formed by this country. Whatever they are doing, whether it is mining or something else, they do for themselves what no one else is here to do for them. Their kind is more endangered every year.
I got the title off a wall at the University of Wyoming. I was walking across a lawn there one day, and I saw that on a wall of the engineering school: “Strive on. The control of nature is won, not given.” I thought, “There’s a good title, because it is perfectly bilateral. It cuts two ways precisely.” So, that’s probably why I wrote this whole thing
We were out in the Atchafalaya Swamp. The struggle down there between the Mississippi River and the Corps of Engineers is epic. The Mississippi wants to take a right in upper Louisiana and go down the Atchafalaya River. Across the past 5,000 years and more, the Mississippi River has been like one hand playing on a piano back and forth as the main channels switch. And this spread like this has built the entire southern part of Louisiana, the lower half.
Sometimes I’ve had pieces not work out at all because they just didn’t gel. But usually you get together with somebody who has a certain expertise and you follow them through their work. You sort of fade into the background and watch them, and it usually works out.
Daily and Wall preside over this operation, which is Western at the top and pure Thai at the ground level, with a gradual shading of cultures in between. FLAG has dealings in many countries, and the arrangement is different in each one. Here, the top level is a 50-50 partnership between FLAG and Thailand’s CAT. They bid the project out to two different large contractors, each of whom hired subcontractors with particular specialties who work through sub-sub-contractors who hire the workers, get them to the site, and make things happen. The incentives are shaped at each level so that the contractors will get the job done without having to be micromanaged, and the roads seem to be crawling with inspectors representing various levels of the project who make sure that the work is being done according to spec (at the height of this operation, 50 percent of the traffic on some of these roads was FLAG-related).
Since these two, and many of the others we will meet on this journey, have much in common with one another, this is as good a place as any to write a general description. They tend to come from the US or the British Commonwealth countries but spend very little time living there. They are cheerful and outgoing, rudely humorous, and frequently have long-term marriages to adaptable wives. They tend to be absolutely straight shooters even when they are talking to a hacker tourist about whom they know nothing. Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today. On the other hand, if I had an unlimited amount of money and woke up tomorrow morning with a burning desire to see a 2,000-hole golf course erected on the surface of Mars, I would probably call men like Daily and Wall, do a handshake deal with them, send them a blank check, and not worry about it.
the way the trans-word "…famously…" operates(06 nov 2011)
sad like tourists in a new city going to a familiar restaurant(06 nov 2011)
In 1979 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but his humor remained. A friend told him, “I’m so glad to see you.” Smiling, Cornfield replied, “That’s nothing compared to how happy I am to be able to see you.” As he lay dying, he called to his two daughters and told them: “You spend your whole life practicing humor for the times when you really need it.”
But Roth is disinclined to talk in terms of metaphor. In a New Yorker interview, he indicated that allegory was a form he disliked and, during our conversation, he more than once says of a work we are discussing: “Well, it’s about what it’s about.”
Basically, this sounds kind of primitive, but the basic endpoint used in anesthesia is that when a surgeon cuts the patient, they don’t move. I’m serious. It’s very, very crude, but it’s the coin of the realm. The bottom line is that when you do something that ought to hurt the animal, it doesn’t respond. In a tadpole that means trying to elicit a startle reflex by tapping their dish, or tapping the tadpole itself. If it doesn’t do anything, it’s considered anesthetized.
we’re talking about interactions with as many as 10, 20, or even 50 different protein targets. That constellation of small effects disrupts the extraordinarily well-timed signaling in the central nervous system to produce the final common pathway of unconsciousness.
Much has changed. Silicon Valley now belongs to the world. In a typical nerd cabal you will find recently arrived Indians, Chinese, Brits, Israelis and Russians. What is strangest in the recent waves of young arrivals in Silicon Valley is that they tend no longer to be downtrodden geniuses rejected in the playing of social status games, but sterling alpha males. Legions of perfect specimens seem to have grown up in manicured childhoods, nothing scrappy about them. When children started to be raised perfectly in the 1990s, chauffeured from one play date to the next, I wondered what world they would want as adults. Socialism? Facebook and similar designs seem to me continuations of the artificial order we gave children during the boom years.
The overlap between the late stages of hippie bohemia and the early incarnations of Silicon Valley was often endearing. There was a sense of justice in the way that males who had been at the bottom of the social ladder in high school were on track to run the world. Greasy cottages with futons on the floor, with dustings of pot and cookie crumbles rubbed into cheap oriental rugs, a carnage of forgotten dirty clothes in the corner, empty refrigerators and tangles of thick grey cables leading to the huge computer monitors and the hot metal cabinets where the silicon chips crunched. Asymmetrical, patchy beards, shirts part tucked, prescriptions for glasses powerful enough to find life on a distant planet
The King’s Speech is the Best Mov Mov Mov Mov Motion Picture Ever, say stuttering, doddering monarchists (Moccasin Telegraph)(04 nov 2011)
And the fact is that none of the products we have would cost what they cost if there weren’t these factories filled with robots. There’s no human being that can assemble a hard drive. No human being can assemble an iPod, much less all the components that go into the iPod. All the stuff that we own has robot fingerprints all over it, whether you know it or not – whether it came from China or whether it’s domestic.
One thing is that if you put these things on, they basically anticipate where your legs and arms are going to move – and their goal is to get out of your way. The whole interface goal of the machine is that you’re not supposed to feel like you’re wearing anything. You just move and it has joints that are very similar to yours and it moves too, and so you’re just walking around inside it. The only difference is that whenever you pick something up all that weight is transferred all the way down to the ground through the frame of the exoskeleton and you don’t feel a thing.
What’s interesting to me from a roboticist’s perspective is that it’s just a problem like any other – killing people. You can program a machine to learn how to do that optimally. What’s really fascinating is that the optimal form that this robot has chosen to kill human beings is another human being. That’s just a really, really cool concept to me; it’s a powerful message.
this direct intentional self-imitation — well, it might not be a definite evil but god is it early(03 nov 2011)
It is vastly to Fitzgerald‘s credit that he appears to have taken their caveats seriously and pondered them to good effect. In The Great Gatsby the highly agreeable fruits of that ponderingare visible. The story, for all its basic triviality, has a fine texture, a careful and brilliant finish. The obvious phrase is simply not in it. The sentences roll along smoothly, sparklingly, variously. There is evidence in every line of hard and intelligent effort. It is a quite new Fitzgerald who emerges from this little book and the qualities that he shows are dignified and solid. This Side of Paradise, after all, might have been merely a lucky accident. But The Great Gatsby, a far inferior story at bottom, is plainly the product of a sound and stable talent, conjured into being by hard work.
I make much of this improvement because it is of an order not often witnessed in American writers, and seldom indeed in those who start off with a popular success. The usual progression, indeed, is in the opposite direction. Every year first books of great promise are published—and every year a great deal of stale drivel is printed by the promising authors of year before last. The rewards of literary success in this country are so vast that, when they come early, they are not unnaturally somewhat demoralizing. The average author yields to them readily. Having struck the bull‘s-eye once, he is too proud to learn new tricks. Above all, he is too proud to tackle hard work. The result is a gradual degeneration of whatever talent he had at the beginning. He begins to imitate himself. He peters out.
Islamist terrorists ask these questions, too. In their view, the West is engaged in a massive assault on Muslim societies and has been for generations, long preceding 9/11. This assault involves military invasions, political domination, economic dependence, and cultural decadence — and, they believe, it is reaching new heights of aggression each year. Islamists offer a solution: the establishment of Islamic government. Revolutionary Islamists offer a strategy to achieve Islamic government: armed insurrection. Terrorist revolutionaries offer a tactic to trigger insurrection: attacks on civilians. These attacks are intended to demoralize the enemy, build Muslims’ self-confidence, and escalate conflict, leading Muslims to realize that armed insurrection is the sole path to defend Islam.
Related to this is the ‘snuggle theory’ – the idea that viewing horror films may be a rite of passage for young people, providing them with an opportunity to fulfil their traditional gender roles. A paper from the late 1980s by Dolf Zillmann, Norbert Mundorf and others found that male undergrads paired with a female partner (unbeknown to them, a research assistant), enjoyed a 14-minute clip from Friday the 13th Part III almost twice as much if she showed distress during the film. Female undergrads, by contrast, said they enjoyed the film more if their male companion appeared calm and unmoved. Moreover, men who were initially considered unattractive were later judged more appealing if they displayed courage during the film viewing. ‘Scary movies and monsters are just the ticket for girls to scream and hold on to a date for dear life and for the date (male or female) to be there to reassure, protect, defend and, if need be, destroy the monster,’ says Fischoff. ‘Both are playing gender roles prescribed by a culture.’(01 nov 2011)
the squamous eldritch horrors and political satire.(01 nov 2011)
a musician who baked a song into his whole discography(30 oct 2011)
people look good when they come in from the cold(29 oct 2011)
Question: what's going on with the data on your coax connection when your TV is turned off? What happens in the moment that you turn it on?(23 oct 2011)
We can so shape transparent substances, and so arrange them with respect to our sight and objects, that rays can be broken and bent as we please; and thus from an incredible distance we may read the smallest letters and number the grains of dust and sand, on account of the greatness of the angle under which we see them; and we may manage so as hardly to see bodies when near to us, on account of the smallness of the angle under which we cause them to be seen; for vision of this sort is not a consequence of distance, except as that affects the magnitude of the angle. And thus a boy may seem a giant, and a man a mountain.(22 oct 2011)
Take the telescope. Just think about how strange it is that you take a piece of material, stick it into a tube, and suddenly can see the moon in close-up detail.(22 oct 2011)
What was it getting with GOOG-411? It soon became clear that what it was getting were demands for pizza spoken in every accent in the continental United States, along with questions about plumbers in Detroit and countless variations on the pronunciations of ‘Schenectady’, ‘Okefenokee’ and ‘Boca Raton’. GOOG-411, a Google researcher later wrote, was a phoneme-gathering operation, a way of improving voice recognition technology through massive data collection.(22 oct 2011)
To reinforce just how wrong a simple-minded application of Bayes’s rule can
go, I invite you to consider the saga of
the Phantom of
Heilbronn. The combined police forces of Europe spent years searching for
a criminal known from high-quality forensic evidence (DNA) left at more 40
crime scenes across a wide swathe of Europe. In the end, it turned out that
the reason all these different crime scenes turned up the same DNA, is that the
swabs used to collect the DNA from the scenes all came from the same factory,
and had been contaminated by DNA from a worker there.(22 oct 2011)
"I still got penitentiary ways about myself"(22 oct 2011)
does it feel like public speaking to make an announcement on the pa as a pilot?(21 oct 2011)
"Self-service parameterized operational reporting"(21 oct 2011)
guy peeling the price tag off a bottle of wine on the steps of a brownstone(21 oct 2011)
“the wrong answer” radio game, taboo, stroop, and priming(21 oct 2011)
“Bulldozer code” that gives the appearance of refactoring by breaking out chunks into subroutines, but that are impossible to reuse in another context (very high cohesion)
on Doctor Who: “It’s a romp, for lack of a better term. It’s a joke that you’re in on.”(17 oct 2011)
A computer program is said to learn from experience E with
respect to some task T and some performance measure P if its
performance on T, as measured by P, improves with experience E. (Machine Learning)(16 oct 2011)
“it looks like the money they spent is on the screen”(16 oct 2011)
and at another, when writing about Letald of St-Mesmin-de-Micy’s attack on chants which mix their modes (Letald calls them “snake-tressed monstrous phantoms”),
You have to learn the Capybara API instead of regular expressions, and you will take more advantage of the snippets Cucumber prints for undefined steps. This also means you have to think in terms of the domain and not the user interface when you write scenarios (The training wheels came off | Aslak Hellesøy)(07 oct 2011)
Clicking links and buttons or filling in text fields has nothing to do with the domain.
Cucumber scenarios that consist of 10 or so steps that click links, fill in fields, push buttons and look for text are going to bore your stakeholders to death.
could it be remade as a program that operates on and outputs text? what would such a program look like?(06 oct 2011)
Hope you’ve got solid rubber tires, because if the agency gets a lock on your direction of flight, you’re getting spiked - and if you hit spikes, you’re hosed. You’ll drive for a while, because spike strips are designed to puncture tires so they slowly deflate as opposed to blowing out. But once they’re flat, driving on them will make them disintegrate; then you’re driving on rims. Now you’re limited to fifteen to twenty miles per hour, and you’re in danger of your vehicle catching fire from the spraying sparks. Meanwhile, the agency is moving the K-9 unit to point position so when you shoulder your smoldering jalopy and make a run for it, Cujo’s got less ground to cover before he eats your forearm. (What’s the best way to escape the police in a high-speed car chase? - Quora)(05 oct 2011)
realizing that the lion king broadway musical was based on the disney movie as one of those moments where I expected the world to run according to foreigner rules(30 sep 2011)
my instinct to ask of that girl, "why are you working?"(30 sep 2011)
how I turn and watch as a guy runs to catch the subway, eager to find out whether he made it — and how that relates to our natural storytelling instinct, and vonnegut's dictum that "everybody must want something, even if it's only a glass of water"(28 sep 2011)
how the neat thing about kids is that for about ten years at least they hang on your every word, and your word exclusively. If you liked teaching, and pontificating, one can hardly imagine a better audience. Especially since you have a strong interest in their biding your advice — so you’d give them the best stuff and really care that they’re learning.(28 sep 2011)
"the throbbing garumps of a Jewish lothario"(28 sep 2011)
the worrisome poopy implications of someone washing their hands too thoroughly(28 sep 2011)
“Publishing a first novel is a down,” he said.
I don’t know whether I was more surprised by the sentiment or by the ’60s locution. We’d known each other back in the hippie days.
“Really?” I said. The past 10 years of hard work had been for nothing?
“You’ve spent your whole life thinking that if you can finally publish a book, everything will change,” he said. “You’ll suddenly be good looking and everybody will love you, the world will throw itself at your feet. Then you publish the damn thing and nothing happens. You’re the same social misfit and compulsive masturbator you always were.”
Reddit: What are the “rules” that a crossword has to obey? I read some of them once, I thought: diagonal symmetry, no more than some percent black spaces, etc.
Quigley: Odd number of squares on a side, grid should have 180 degree symmetry, no more than 1/6th of the grid is black square, word count something like 78 words for a 15x, 72 words if there’s no theme, no repeated words—even in the clues.
Reddit: Why those specifics?
Quigley: The first crossword editor, Margaret Farrar, came up with these rules to help her sift through the slush pile faster. She felt that anything else would be too easy to make and too simple to solve. Despite all the changes that the crossword has gone through, all of her rules stuck.
Reddit: How do you go about filling in the words? I would assume you do the longer words first, followed by theme words?
Quigley: You start with the longest entries first, then you put in the entries that span the longest entries, then you work simultaneously across and down until you hit a corner.
“Overeating is the addiction choice of carers, and that’s why it’s come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions. It’s a way of fucking yourself up whilst still remaining fully functional, because you have to. Fat people aren’t indulging in the ‘luxury’ of their addiction making them useless, chaotic or a burden. Instead, they are slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn’t inconvenience anyone. And that’s why it’s so often a woman’s addiction of choice. All the quietly eating mums. All the KitKats in office drawers. All the unhappy moments, late at night, caught only in the fridge-light.”
routine size, testing, and rube goldberg machines (think of a submachine failing vs. a pulley). no need to factor out pulleys, because the failure mode of a pulley isn't very interesting. related: what was that game with the gizmos?(26 sep 2011)
* A study of upper-level computer-science students found that students’ comprehension of a program that was super-modularized into routines about 10 lines long was no better than their comprehension of a program that had no routines at all (Conte, Dunsmore, and Shen 1986). When the program was broken into routines of moderate length (about 25 lines), however, students scored 65% better on a test of comprehension.
The essential fact of folding, however, remains that the amino acid sequence of each protein contains the information that specifies both the native structure and the pathway to attain that state. (Protein folding - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(25 sep 2011)
Tiger had a birdie in his pocket, unless he jerked it over the flock of genuine American coots and dunked it into the designer pond in front of the green. All he had to do was lay it up, pitch the ball close and sink his short putt. That was the safe play. That was what he should have done.
Tiger took a wood out of his bag.
The gallery erupted.
It had been a long time since any golf gallery cheered someone for removing a club from his bag. The ovation was not about redemption or about inspiration. It was not about the metaphysical maundering of theological dilettantes. It was about courage and risk and athletic daring. Its ultimate source was irrelevant, but I do not believe this golden moment was foreordained by God while Earl Woods was stumbling around Indochina trying not to get his ass shot off.
Why is the bishop pair so valuable? One explanation is that the bishop is really a more valuable piece than the knight due to its greater average mobility, but unless you have both bishops the opponent can play so as to take advantage of the fact that the bishop can only attack squares of one color. In my opinion, another reason is that any other pair of pieces suffers from redundancy. Two knights, two rooks, bishop and knight, or major plus minor piece are all capable of guarding the same squares, and therefore there is apt to be some duplication of function.(25 sep 2011)
Let me try for a wider explanation, because this is all coming very close to what I’ll call the Andy Grove Fallacy. The single biggest difference between the two types of R&D is this: McLaren is trying to optimize a technology that was discovered and developed by humans. GSK is trying to optimize against one that was not. Really, really not human, not done with human motives or with human understanding in mind. Living systems, I believe, are the only such technology we’ve ever encountered, and it’s something to see. Billions of years of evolutionary tinkering have lead to something so complex and so strange that it can make the highest human-designed technology look like something built with sticks. To give Andy Grove a tiny break, the devices we’ve built in the IT industry (and the software used to run them) are the closest approximations, but they’re really not very close, because we made them, and what human ingenuity can make, human ingenuity can understand. The body-temperature water-based molecular nanotechnology that’s running us (and every other living thing on the planet) is something else again. And it comes with no documentation at all, other than what we can puzzle out ourselves, a process still very much incomplete.(25 sep 2011)
When James, the squadron commander, spoke, he started by citing all the forward operating bases in eastern Afghanistan that had been named for SEALs killed in combat. “Everything we have done for the last ten years prepared us for this,” he told Obama. The President was “in awe of these guys,” Ben Rhodes, the deputy national-security adviser, who travelled with Obama, said. “It was an extraordinary base visit,” he added. “They knew he had staked his Presidency on this. He knew they staked their lives on it.”
Brian invited James, the commander of DEVGRU’s Red Squadron, and Mark, the master chief petty officer, to join him at C.I.A. headquarters. They spent the next two and a half weeks considering ways to get inside bin Laden’s house. One option entailed flying helicopters to a spot outside Abbottabad and letting the team sneak into the city on foot. The risk of detection was high, however, and the SEALs would be tired by a long run to the compound. The planners had contemplated tunnelling in—or, at least, the possibility that bin Laden might tunnel out. But images provided by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency showed that there was standing water in the vicinity, suggesting that the compound sat in a flood basin. The water table was probably just below the surface, making tunnels highly unlikely. Eventually, the planners agreed that it made the most sense to fly directly into the compound. “Special operations is about doing what’s not expected, and probably the least expected thing here was that a helicopter would come in, drop guys on the roof, and land in the yard,” the special-operations officer said.
A male employee, Ken, walks into the copy room and sees a female employee, Barb, making copies. Barb looks up and says, "Hello." Ken asks, "Hello." Ken asks, "Reproducing, eh? Can I help?"(22 sep 2011)
"I need someone here working, not out welping a pup"(22 sep 2011)
After a square meal of roast beef and vegetables, and mince pie
and watermelon, you can’t say just which ingredient is going into muscle,
but you don’t have to be very bright to figure out which one started the
demand for painkiller in your insides, or to guess, next morning, which
one made you believe in a personal devil the night before. And so, while
a fellow can’t figure out to an ounce whether it’s Latin or algebra or
history or [Pg 006] what among the solids that is building him up in this place
or that, he can go right along feeding them in and betting that they’re
not the things that turn his tongue fuzzy. It’s down among the sweets,
among his amusements and recreations, that he’s going to find his
stomach-ache, and it’s there that he wants to go slow and to pick and
choose. (The Project Gutenberg eBook of Letters from A Self-Made Merchant To His Son, by George Horace Lorimer.)(21 sep 2011)
The first thing that any education ought to give a man is character, and
the second thing is education. That is where I’m a little skittish about
this college business. I’m not starting in to preach to you, because I
know a young fellow with the right sort of stuff in him preaches to
himself harder than any one else can, and that he’s mighty often
switched off the right path by having it pointed out to him in the wrong
way.
Dear Pierrepont: Your Ma got back safe this morning and she wants me
to be sure to tell you not to over-study, and I want to tell you to be
sure not to under-study. What we’re really sending you to Harvard for is
to get a little of the education that’s so good and plenty there. When
it’s passed around you don’t want to be bashful, but reach right out and
take a big helping every time, for I want you to get your share. You’ll
find that education’s about the only thing lying around loose in this
world, and that it’s about the only thing a fellow can have as much of
as he’s willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and
the screw-driver lost. (The Project Gutenberg eBook of Letters from A Self-Made Merchant To His Son, by George Horace Lorimer.)(21 sep 2011)
The Supreme Court in Santosky further noted that “Since the factfinding phase of a permanent neglect proceeding is an adversary contest between the State and the natural parents, the relevant question is whether a preponderance standard fairly allocates the risk of an erroneous factfinding between these two parties.” Id, at 761. The Supreme Court found, in the context of a termination of parental rights proceeding, that such an evidentiary standard did not fairly allocate these risks. Id, at 758. Its reasoning is equally applicable to abuse and neglect proceedings:
The State’s ability to assemble its case almost inevitably dwarfs the parents’ ability to mount a defense. No predetermined limits restrict the sums an agency may spend in prosecuting a given termination proceeding. The State’s attorney usually will be expert on the issues contested and the procedures employed at the factfinding hearing, and enjoys full access to all public records concerning the family. The State may call on experts in family relations, psychology, and medicine to bolster its case. Furthermore, the primary witnesses at the hearing will be the agency’s own professional caseworkers, whom the State has empowered both to investigate the family situation and to testify against the parents…. A standard of proof that, by its very terms, demands consideration of the quantity, rather than the quality, of the evidence may misdirect the factfinder in the marginal case.
Or had they purchased it from Zlob’s authors (believed to be East European criminal hackers) on the exploit black market, where zero-days can sell for as high as $50,000 to $500,000?
The wagoneer hardly hears you. “Of course!” he shouts. “It’s all so obvious in retrospect! Wood is simply the wrong material for building wagons! This is the dawn of a new era - the nonwood era - of wheels, axles, carts all made from nonwood! Not only that, instead of taking apples to market, we’ll take nonapples! There’s a huge market for nonapples - people buy far more nonapples than apples - we should have no trouble selling them! It will be the era of the nouvelle wagon!”
The set “apples” is much narrower than the set “not apples”. Apples form a compact cluster in thingspace, but nonapples vary much more widely in price, and size, and use. When you say to build a wagon using “wood”, you’re giving much more concrete advice than when you say “not wood”. There are different kinds of wood, of course - but even so, when you say “wood”, you’ve narrowed down the range of possible building materials a whole lot more than when you say “not wood”.
In the same fashion, “asynchronous” - literally “not synchronous” - is a much larger design space than “synchronous”. If one considers the space of all communicating processes, then synchrony is a very strong constraint on those processes. If you toss out synchrony, then you have to pick some other method for preventing communicating processes from stepping on each other - synchrony is one way of doing that, a specific answer to the question.
The Law of Demeter (LoD) or Principle of Least Knowledge is a design guideline for developing software, particularly object-oriented programs. In its general form, the LoD is a specific case of loose coupling. The guideline was invented at Northeastern University towards the end of 1987, and can be succinctly summarized in one of the following ways:
Each unit should have only limited knowledge about other units: only units “closely” related to the current unit.
Each unit should only talk to its friends; don’t talk to strangers.
Only talk to your immediate friends.
The fundamental notion is that a given object should assume as little as possible about the structure or properties of anything else (including its subcomponents).
the idea of only reading primary sources, or deep-dive books, both for sluyteresque reasons and because that's the stuff that'll stick
like dissertations, conference proceedings, interviews, manuals, etc.(19 sep 2011)
what of that senior year feeling of owning the place?(19 sep 2011)
While the reasons for this ubiquitous male vulnerability remain debated, there are several compelling reasons why men are more likely than women to die under the extreme conditions the Donner Party faced. First, men are bigger than women. Typical body weights for the world as a whole are about 140 pounds for men and only 120 pounds for women. Hence, even while lying down and doing nothing, men need more food to support their basal metabolism. They also need more energy than women do for equivalent physical activity. Even for sedentary people, the typical metabolic rate for an average-size woman is 25 percent lower than an average-size man’s. Under conditions of cold temperatures and heavy physical activity, such as were faced by the Donner Party men when doing the backbreaking work of cutting the wagon road or hunting for food, men’s metabolic rates can be double those of women. To top it all off, women have more fat reserves than men: fat makes up 22 percent of the body weight of an average nonobese, well- nourished woman, but only 16 percent of a similar man. More of the man’s weight is instead made up of muscle, which gets burned up much more quickly than does fat. Thus, when there simply was no more food left, the Donner Party men burned up their body reserves much faster than did the women. Furthermore, much of women’s fat is distributed under the skin and acts as heat insulation, so that they can withstand cold temperatures better than men can. Women don’t have to raise their metabolic rate to stay warm as soon as men do.
abies have special problems. Per pound of body weight a baby has twice an adult’s surface area, which means double the area across which body heat can escape. To maintain body temperature, babies have to increase their metabolic rate when air temperature drops only a few degrees below body temperature, whereas adults don’t have to do so until a drop of 20 to 35 degrees. At cold temperatures the factor by which babies must increase their metabolism to stay warm is several times that for adults. These considerations place even well-fed babies at risk under cold conditions. And the Donner Party babies were at a crippling further disadvantage because they had so little food to fuel their metabolism. They literally froze to death.
The fourth and last rescue team reached the lake on April 17 to find Keseberg alone, surrounded by indescribable filth and mutilated corpses. George Donner’s body lay with his skull split open to permit the extraction of his brains. Three frozen ox legs lay in plain view almost uneaten beside a kettle of cut-up human flesh. Near Keseberg sat two kettles of blood and a large pan full of fresh human liver and lungs. He alleged that his four companions had died natural deaths, but he was frank about having eaten them. As to why he had not eaten ox leg instead, he explained that it was too dry: human liver and lungs tasted better, and human brains made a good soup.
When William Eddy and William Foster, who had gotten out with the snowshoers, reached the lake with the third rescue team on March 13, they found that Keseberg had eaten their sons.
Bogin had another innovation: classes were videotaped. This was not a vestige of Soviet surveillance. Rather, he wanted to critique how teachers interacted with — and nurtured relations between — children. Bogin and his staff often worked late into the night, reviewing footage and discussing methodology. (My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling - NYTimes.com)(19 sep 2011)
After performing an unaccustomed eccentric exercise and exhibiting severe soreness, the muscle rapidly adapts to reduce further damage from the same exercise. This is called the “repeated-bout effect”.[9]
There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day.
Indian at a bagel store: “they’re giving away lakhs at the bagel store”(16 sep 2011)
"College boys will say a college girl who had brothers tends to have an appealing sort of winking lack of seriousness"(16 sep 2011)
The towers are not located at the center a circle. The cells are usually hexagons and one tower with a tri-dimensional antenna sits at the vertex of three cells. More on this in subsequent posts.(16 sep 2011)
Last, but surely not least, Rylands’ articulation of strict liability as a general idea is an essential part of the formative moment of modern tort law(16 sep 2011)
After excavating the basis and nature of strict liability in Rylands,(16 sep 2011)
you know it’s like there’s a fifth wall in that room when drew’s playing(16 sep 2011)
is there a way you have to move a laser pointer before a cat becomes interested in it? (or is there a way to move it so the cat isn't interested?)(15 sep 2011)
how bittorrent is like costco in that the merchandise mostly comes in bulk, and how this is probably because seeders wouldn't suit up for the extra niche-y stuff(15 sep 2011)
The main things that Amos Tversky and I worked with are cases in which similarity is used instead of probability. Our most famous example is a lady named “Linda”. I don’t know how many of you have heard of Linda. Linda studied philosophy in college, and most people think she was at Berkeley. She participated in anti-nuclear marches, she was very active, she’s very bright, and ten years have passed, and what is she now? Is she an accountant? No. Is she a bank teller? No. Is she a feminist? Yes. Is she a feminist bank teller? Yes. You can see what happens. She a feminist bank teller because, in terms of similarity, it’s perfect to say that she’s more like a feminist bank teller than she is like a bank teller. In terms of probability, it doesn’t work. But what happens is when you’re asked to compute probability, probability is hard, similarity is immediate; it’s a natural assessment. It will come in first, and it will preempt the correct calculation.
The confidence that people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence, it is not a judgment of the quality of the evidence but it is a judgment of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.
“A politician knows that more important than the bill that is proposed is the law that is passed. A politician knows that his friends are not always his allies, and that his adversaries are not his enemies. A politician knows how to make the process of democracy work, and loves the intricate workings of the democratic system. A politician knows not only how to count votes, but how to make his vote count. A politician knows that his words are his weapons, but that his word is his bond. A politician knows that only if he leaves room for discussion and room for concession can he gain room for maneuver. A politician knows that the best way to be a winner is to make the other side feel it does not have to be a loser.”
Per capita electricity shot up from about 4,000 kilowatt-hours per US resident to over 13,000 kilowatt-hours by the 2000s.(15 sep 2011)
if someone asked you to realistically cast a new york subway car, could you do it?(15 sep 2011)
“Except for these fiddles, not one single object on this earth works better than it did 200 years ago,” he says insistently. “Stradivari is the ultimate icon of Western civilization. I mean, what finer thing exists?”
“Tower’s stories [have] the kind of torque that’s so damnably rare these days in American short fiction, where the payoff tends to be the faint, jewel-box click of epiphany, the small tilting of a life. Tower’s ambition is greater and brawnier than that.”(14 sep 2011)
My favorite the ory of the day. That the rea son Euro pean drag ons and Chi nese drag ons may look dif fer ent is that Europe had ter adactyls (bird like with wings) fos sils and Chi nese had sauro pod fos sils (long).
I’m reminded of the odd practice in cigar factories of appointing a lector, or reader. Factory managers hired a lector with a good, strong voice to read to their workers, keeping their minds occupied while their skilled hands wrapped tobacco leaves in tight rolls. Although the lector was paid by the owners, he was able to suggest his own readings - and the selection was typically left to a vote of the workers themselves. Novels, newspapers, political tracts - the selections were eclectic. But the results were striking - manual laborers receiving all the fruits of an education they never would have been able to afford
Logos are like containers of dreams for the business to be. That's why they seem so important to new founders. They're meant to graphically represent the vision, attitude, and grounding spirit of the enterprise. So they have to look a certain way. All the curves and graphical choices have to stand for something.
It's like these paragraphs underneath paintings in an exhibition. The prose does more work, in terms of conveying what the piece is meant to "say," than the piece itself. Isn't the more valid reaction the one that a person has when the painting is presented bare?
These pitches, then, that go into the crafting and selling of a particular logo, are a joke, because the impact of the thing will really come down to bare aesthetics — what does it look like? Is it poorly colored? — and, of course, the associations it evokes. None of which come from inside the logo. What matters is the operation of the business and its branding. The signifier is arbitrary.(11 sep 2011)
"Amazing how much they can talk about medicine without talking about patients."(11 sep 2011)
To be imprinted falsely regarding one's looks.(11 sep 2011)
They left sugar-filled petri dishes out overnight at a remote Egyptian date farm, to capture wild airborne yeast cells, then mailed the samples to a Belgian lab, where the organisms were isolated and grown in large quantities.
As a boy, John Seo learned everything he could about the Titanic. “It was considered unsinkable because it had a hull of 16 chambers,” he says. The chambers were stacked back to front. If the ship hit something head on, the object might puncture the front chamber, but it would likely have to puncture at least three more to sink the ship. “They probably said, What are the odds of four chambers going?” he says. “There might have been a one-in-a-hundred chance of puncturing a single chamber, but the odds of puncturing four chambers, they probably thought of as one in a million. That’s because they thought of them as independent chambers. And the chambers might have been independent if the first officer hadn’t gambled at the last minute and swerved. By swerving, the iceberg went down the side of the ship. If the officer had taken it head on, he might have killed a passenger or two, but the ship might not have sunk. The mistake was to turn. Often people associate action with lowering risk or controlling risk,
And a smile — ah, I would get me a smile. I’m still working on that smile. It is to combine the best qualities of a hotel manager, an experienced old social weasel, a headmaster on visitors’ day, a colored elevator man, a pansy pulling a profile, a producer getting stuff at half its market value, a trained nurse coming on a new job, a body-vender in her first rotogravure, a hopeful extra swept near the camera, a ballet dancer with an infected toe, and of course the great beam of loving kindness common to all those from Washington to Beverly Hills who must exist by virtue of the contorted pan.
So, since I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for four years? I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempts to be a person — to be kind, just, or generous. There were plenty of counterfeit coins around that would pass instead of these and I knew where I could get them at a nickel on the dollar. In thirty-nine years an observant eye has learned to detect where the milk is watered and the sugar is sanded, the rhinestone passed for diamond and the stucco for stone. (Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire)(11 sep 2011)
I told of the succeeding period of desolation and of the necessity of going on, but without the benefit of Henley’s familiar heroics, “my head is bloody but unbowed. (Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire)(11 sep 2011)
(1) That I had done very little thinking, save within the problems of my craft. For twenty years a certain man had been my intellectual conscience. That was Edmund Wilson.
(2) That another man represented my sense of the “good life,” though I saw him once in a decade, and since then he might have been hung. He is in the fur business in the Northwest and wouldn’t like his name set down here. But in difficult situations I have tried to think what he would have thought, how he would have acted.
(3) That a third contemporary had been an artistic conscience to me — I had not imitated his infectious style, because my own style, such as it is, was formed before he published anything, but there was an awful pull toward him when I was on a spot.
(4) That a fourth man had come to dictate my relations with other people when these relations were successful: how to do, what to say. How to make people at least momentarily happy (in opposition to Mrs. Post’s theories of how to make everyone thoroughly uncomfortable with a sort of systemized vulgarity). This always confused me and made me want to go out and get drunk, but this man had seen the game, analyzed it, and beaten it, and his word was good enough for me.
(5) That my political conscience had scarcely existed for ten years save as an element of irony in my stuff. When I became again concerned with the system I should function under, it was a man much younger than myself who brought it to me, with a mixture of passion and fresh air.
So there was not an “I” anymore — not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect — save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more. It was strange to have no self — to be like a little boy left along in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do —
Well, when I had reached this period of silence, I was forced into a measure that no one ever adopts voluntarily: I was impelled to think. God, was it difficult! The moving about of great secret trunks. (Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire)(11 sep 2011)
I set that down as an example of what haunted me during the long night — this was something I could neither accept nor struggle against, something which tended to make my efforts obsolescent, as the chain stores have crippled the small merchant, an exterior force, unbeatable —
(I have the sense of lecturing now, looking at a watch on the desk before me and seeing how many more minutes — )
Originally published as a three-part series in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Esquire
Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work — the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside — the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within — that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick — the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.
Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation — the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the “impossible,” come true. Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both. It seemed a romantic business to be a successful literary man — you were not ever going to be as famous as a movie star but what note you had was probably longer-lived; you were never going to have the power of a man of strong political or religious convictions but you were certainly more independent. Of course within the practice of your trade you were forever unsatisfied — but I, for one, would not have chosen any other.
As the Twenties passed, with my own twenties marching a little ahead of them, my two juvenile regrets — at not being big enough (or good enough) to play football in college, and at not getting overseas during the war — resolved themselves into childish waking dreams of imaginary heroism that were good enough to go to sleep on in restless nights. The big problems of life seemed to solve themselves, and if the business of fixing them was difficult, it made one too tired to think of more general problems.
Life, ten years ago, was largely a personal matter. I must hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to “succeed” — and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills — domestic, professional, and personal — then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.
For seventeen years, with a year of deliberate loafing and resting out in the center — things went on like that, with a new chore only a nice prospect for he next day. I was living hard, too, but: “Up to forty-nine it’ll be all right,” I said. “I can count on that. For a man who’s lived as I have, that’s all you could ask.”
— And then, ten years this side of forty-nine, I suddenly realized I had prematurely cracked.
Now a man can crack in many ways — can crack in the head, in which case the power of decision is taken from you by others; or in the body, when one can but submit to the white hospital world; or in the nerves. William Seabrook in an unsympathetic book tells, with some pride and a movie ending, of how he became a public charge. What led to his alcoholism, or was bound up with it, was a collapse of his nervous system. Though the present writer was not so entangled — having at the time not tasted so much as a glass of beer for six months — it was his nervous reflexes that were giving way — too much anger and too many tears.
Moreover, to go back to my thesis that life has a varying offensive, the realization of having cracked was not simultaneous with a blow, but with a reprieve.
Not long before, I had sat in the office of a great doctor and listened to a grave sentence. With what, in retrospect, seems some equanimity, I had gone on about my affairs in the city where I was then living, not caring much, not thinking how much had been left undone, or what would become of this and that responsibility, like people do in books; I was well insured and anyhow I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent.
But I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life — I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved — in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.
But now I wanted to be absolutely alone and so arranged a certain insulation from ordinary cares.
It was not an unhappy time. I went away and there were fewer people. I found I was good-and-tired. I could lie around and was glad to, sleeping or dozing sometimes twenty hours a day and in the intervals trying resolutely not to think — instead I made lists — made lists and tore them up, hundreds of lists: of cavalry leaders and football players and cities, and popular tunes and pitchers, and happy times, and hobbies and houses lived in and how many suits since I left the army and how many pairs of shoes (I didn’t count the suit I bought in Sorrento that shrank, nor the pumps and dress shirt and collar that I carried around for years and never wore, because the pumps got damp and grainy and the shirt and collar got yellow and starch-rotted). And lists of women I’d liked, and of the times I had let myself be snubbed by people who had not been my betters in character or ability.
— And then suddenly, surprisingly, I got better.
— And cracked like an old plate as soon as I heard the news.
That is the real end of this story. What was to be done about it will have to rest in what used to be called the “womb of time.” Suffice to say that after about an hour of solitary pillow-hugging, I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt. What was the small gift of life given back in comparison to that? — when there had once been a pride of direction and a confidence in enduring independence.
I realized that in those two years, in order to preserve something — an inner hush maybe, maybe not — I had weaned myself from all the things I used to love — that every act of life from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner had become an effort. I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations — with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country — contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness — hating the night when I couldn’t sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day.
There were certain spots, certain faces I could look at. Like most midwesterners, I have never had any but the vaguest race prejudices — I always had a secret yen for the lovely Scandinavian blondes who sat on porches in St. Paul but hadn’t emerged enough economically to be part of what was then society. They were too nice to be “chickens” and too quickly off the farmlands to seize a place in the sun, but I remember going round blocks to catch a single glimpse of shining hair — the bright shock of a girl I’d never know. This is urban, unpopular talk. It strays afield from the fact that in these latter days I couldn’t stand the sight of Celts, English, Politicians, Strangers, Virginians, Negroes (light or dark), Hunting People, or retail clerks, and middlemen in general, all writers (I avoided writers carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can) — and all the classes as classes and most of them as members of their class…
Trying to cling to something, I liked doctors and girl children up to the age of about thirteen and well-brought-up boy children from about eight years old on. I could have peace and happiness with these few categories of people. I forgot to add that I liked old men — men over seventy, sometimes over sixty if their faces looked seasoned. I liked Katherine Hepburn’s face on the screen, no matter what was said about her pretentiousness, and Miriam Hopkins’s face, and old friends if I only saw them once a year and could remember their ghosts.
All rather inhuman and undernourished, isn’t it? Well, that, children, is the true sign of cracking up.
It is not a pretty picture. Inevitably it was carted here and there within its frame and exposed to various critics. One of them can only be described as a person whose life makes other people’s lives seem like death — even this time when she was cast in the unusually unappealing role of Job’s comforter. In spite of the fact that this story is over, let me append our conversation as a sort of postscript:
“Instead of being so sorry for yourself, listen — “she said. (She always says “Listen,” because she thinks while she talks — really thinks.) So she said: “Listen. Suppose this wasn’t a crack in you — suppose it was a crack in the Grand Canyon.”
“The crack’s in me,” I said heroically.
“Listen! The world only exists in your eyes — your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you’re trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it’s much better to say that it’s not you that’s cracked — it’s the Grand Canyon.”
“Baby, et up all her Spinoza?”
“I don’t know anything about Spinoza. I know — “ She spoke, then, of old woes of her own, that seemed, in telling, to have been more dolorous than mine, and how she had met them, overridden them, beaten them.
I felt a certain reaction to what she said, but I am a slow-thinking man, and it occurred to me simultaneously that of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one. In days when juice came into one as an article without duty, one tried to distribute it — but always without success; to further mix metaphors, vitality never “takes.” You have it or you haven’t it, like health or brown eyes or honor or a baritone voice. I might have asked some of it from her, neatly wrapped and ready for home cooking and digestion, but I could never have got it — not if I’d waited around for a thousand hours with the tin cup of self-pity. I could walk from her door, holding myself very carefully like cracked crockery, and go away into the world of bitterness, where I was making a home with such materials as are found there — and quote to myself after I left her door:
“Ye are the salt of the earth. But if the salt hath lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?”
Life, ten years ago, was largely a personal matter. I must hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to “succeed” — and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills — domestic, professional, and personal — then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.
Life, ten years ago, was largely a personal matter. I must hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to “succeed” — and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can’t escape, Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
“As a result of these developments in method, Ford’s cars came off the line in three minute intervals. This was much faster than previous methods, increasing production by eight to one (requiring 12.5 man-hours before, 1 hour 33 minutes after), while using less manpower.[2] It was so successful, paint became a bottleneck. Only japan black would dry fast enough, forcing the company to drop the variety of colors available before 1914, until fast-drying Duco lacquer was developed in 1926.[2] In 1914, an assembly line worker could buy a Model T with four months’ pay.[2](09 sep 2011)
“I feel like this year’s fibonacci conference will be as big as the last two combined!”(09 sep 2011)
The requests (which are just URLs, and any postdata/cookies if applicable) are sent to my server via SMS.
The responses are sent back to the phone via MMS, in up to 5 (I think?) segments. I download the webpage along with all resources (stylesheets, images, etc.) and put everything in a zip file. I encode the zip file as a PNG (each RGB pixel is 3 bytes of the zip file) and send the PNG in the MMS.
What does it say about us that we keep cats and dogs as pets — that we had the urge to in the first place?(09 sep 2011)
One initially thinks that Jim Carey in Liar Liar could say something like "P does not equal NP" and be a hero, because if it weren't true, he wouldn't be able to say it.
But the "truth" that his son's wish was after wasn't truth in the mathematical sense, but truth in the sense of saying what you believe. If Jim were unable to say "P does not equal NP" it wouldn't mean that the statement is false (and therefore that P = NP), but rather that Jim doesn't believe that P does not equal NP. He would be misrepresenting what he thinks, which is what the wish forbids.
In The Invention of Lying the implied epistemology is the obverse.(09 sep 2011)
Unlike many books that are strong on analysis, the prescription isn’t bad because it is an anemic afterthought shoved into a last chapter(08 sep 2011)
"T.G.I.F's" inspired blend of Taylor Swiftian teen aspiration - which is a kind of humility - and relish in the impure vices - which is not - even manifests, and crisply at that, in the difference between the raw audio track and its video.(08 sep 2011)
"I don't like the word 'stress'. It's a Madison Avenue word, it's something that can be cured with flavored coffee and bath bubbles."(07 sep 2011)
(Gaining a leg up in the transfer grab, Northwestern sent “conditional admittance” letters to a bunch of students denied initial admission, informing them that they will be admitted as transfers if they meet a specified class rank in their first year elsewhere. )(06 sep 2011)
namely his prejudiced (in the exact meaning of that term—pre-judged)(06 sep 2011)
It might be a good idea to rip through my Reader shares and collect the "greatest hits", or the best ones, especially ones that might have been missed. I could put them on a page on jsomers.net somewhere, for instance.(05 sep 2011)
My little brother, quoting a noted SC personality: when you’re ahead, get more ahead. It is probably the most important strategic lesson in the game: if you have a temporary 5 pct material advantage, you can still easily get outplayed if you force a fight. Better to turn that into a 10 pct material advantage, etc, and force a fight only after you’ve already won. (Hacker News | Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.)(05 sep 2011)
does c overrely on the idea of a long tail?(05 sep 2011)
AI parsing and A not getting R's "She made those for Valentine's Day." Does "those" refer to those very chipwiches, or just the type of chipwich?(05 sep 2011)
"So did you end up going to computer camp, after all that criticism from your brothers?"… "ZEEEEERRRROOOOOO!"(05 sep 2011)
You could not say a word and still be thought a great conversationalist if your interlocutor somehow trusts you with their best stuff, thinks that with you they can operate at full bandwidth — basically if they like what they imagine you're thinking as they talk.(05 sep 2011)
Harder steels for cutting edges were developed[3] which allowed steel rather than iron to be used for parts, eliminating the problem of warping and dimensional changes associated with heat treatment hardening of iron parts after machining.[1] Modern cutting edges use materials such as tungsten carbide. Other innovations were drop forging and stamped steel parts, which reduced or eliminated the amount of machining.
Interchangeability of parts was achieved by combining a number of innovations and improvements in machining operations and machine tools. These innovations included invention of new machine tools, jigs for guiding the machine tools, fixtures for holding the workpiece in the proper position, and blocks and gauges to check the accuracy of the finished parts.[1]Electrification allowed individual machine tools to be powered by electric motors, eliminating line shaft drives from steam engines or water power and allowing higher speeds, making modern large scale manufacturing possible.[2] Modern machines tools often have numerical control (NC) which evolved into CNC (computerized numeric control) when microprocessors became available.
Understanding what soldiers perceive as they scan is also important. The ability to distinguish animal from other organic and mechanical motion “is hard-coded in our brain,” Merlo told me. “It’s evolutionarily advantageous to know that a moving tree branch is not nearly as dangerous as a moving tiger.” Disguising joint movement is especially critical. Breaking up a soldier’s pattern at the elbows, knees, hips, and shoulders can help deflect an enemy’s attention. “Ultimately,” said Merlo, “we’re trying to confuse the way that you detect targets out in nature.”
“the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and for turning what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies.” ()(03 sep 2011)
Dumont and its neighboring towns happen to be a gold mine for prescription-fillings. For every square half-mile in the area, residents are filling more than 80,000 prescriptions per year. In Dumont alone, that means there are at least 320,000 prescriptions filled annually. Eighty thousand is a magic number for national pharmacies — it’s the bare minimum required before entering a market. There are eight pharmacies within two miles of Dumont, but the area’s annual prescription demand suggests it could support four or five more. This battle will rage on.
The point at which an entire family was doomed was when its last mobile member became too weak to queue for rations. Heads of households — usually mothers — were thus faced with a heartbreaking dilemma: whether to eat more food themselves, so as to stay on their feet, or whether to give more to the family’s sickest member — usually a grandparent or child — and risk the lives of all. That many or most prioritised their children is indicated by the large numbers of orphans they left behind. The lucky ones were put into children’s homes; the unlucky had their cards stolen by neighbours, took to thieving on the streets or simply died alone.
So there’s something that we call the law of diminishing returns in our cooking. That’s why the steak is only two ounces, because by your fifth bite you’re really, you’re done. You’re done with that steak. You know what it’s going to taste like. The actual flavor starts to deaden on the palate.
If we were to make you take 10 more bites, by the time you got to bite 15, the steak’s just not that compelling anymore. So if we have a series of 23 small courses, where it’s a burst of flavor on the palate, and then you move on to something completely different and then completely different, that helps us set up a more exciting meal, and it’s something that is easier to kind of be compelled to go through a 23-course menu. (Managerial Econ: America’s top chef uses marginal analysis)(02 sep 2011)
The eleven billion paper clips used each year in this country are made largely in the United States, perhaps because there are 100%+ tariffs on the import of paper clips from abroad. Yet ACCO, the number one American clip maker, reports that paper clips account for less than one percent of their sales. Some of ACCO’s 38 paper clip-making machines are more than fifty years old. One rival company claims it does not understand how Americans use so many paper clips, namely 35 per American.(01 sep 2011)
I’m afraid the novelist J.M. Coetzee was at least partially right: “Always move towards pain when making art.”(01 sep 2011)
Steve Jobs doesn’t tolerate duds. Shortly after the launch event, he summoned the MobileMe team, gathering them in the Town Hall auditorium in Building 4 of Apple’s campus, the venue the company uses for intimate product unveilings for journalists. According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs walked in, clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question:
“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”
For the next half-hour Jobs berated the group. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he told them. “You should hate each other for having let each other down.” The public humiliation particularly infuriated Jobs. Walt Mossberg, the influential Wall Street Journal gadget columnist, had panned MobileMe. “Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us,” Jobs said. On the spot, Jobs named a new executive to run the group.(01 sep 2011)
Craig Roh, who runs up and down the stairs in Haven Hall if he gets to class early.(01 sep 2011)
Each of our airplanes we fly is equipped with FOQA, pronounced ‘folk-wa’, or Flight Operations Quality Assurance, a monitoring system that records every parameter for every approach over a two-week period. So if we had been just two knots fast before we extended the flaps or we didn’t have them fully extended by 1,000 feet, or if we were high or fast, the captain would be called and asked to explain, with immunity for the most part, what caused this approach to be out of tolerances.(01 sep 2011)
Now David’s been at Dover for the past two years and he’s beginning to think cab freedom is just another myth. “I’ll tell you when I started to get scared,” David says. “I’m driving down Flatbush and I see a lady hailing, so I did what I normally do, cut across three lanes of traffic and slam on the brakes right in front of her. I wait for her to get in, and she looks at me like I’m crazy. It was only then I realized I was driving my own car, not the cab.” (Night-Shifting for the Hip Fleet)(31 aug 2011)
who make considerably more money [the word reads “sophisticated”. this one’s from an article written in 1975](31 aug 2011)
Hanging around at shape-up today are a college professor, a couple of Ph.D. candidates, a former priest, a calligrapher, a guy who drives to pay his family’s land taxes in Vermont, a Rumanian discotheque D.J., plenty of M.A.’s, a slew of social workers, trombone players, a guy who makes 300-pound sculptures out of solid rock, the inventor of the electric harp, professional photographers, and the usual gang of starving artists, actors, and writers. (Night-Shifting for the Hip Fleet)(31 aug 2011)
what does it say about us that we wanted (enough to make it happen) cats and dogs as pets?(30 aug 2011)
How to generate all these lecture notes, blog posts, etc.? Well, if you thought by writing things up…(30 aug 2011)
And as Good explains, this result is based on only very weak assumptions about the population distribution and the sampling process: we assume only that the distribution remains constant as samples are taken, and that each individual sampling event is independent of the others.
(It’s worth observing that even this rather weak assumption may be false in real situations, in particular where the “animals” being sampled run in herds or flocks or swarms.)
One of the most straightforward results of this interesting paper is that (where N is the total observed count of individuals),
the expected total chance of all species that are each represented r times … in the sample is approximately
(r+1)nr+1/N
and as a result,
We may say that the proportion of the population represented by the [species in the] sample is approximately 1−n1/N, and the chance that the next animal sampled will belong to a new species is approximately
This is closely related to the problem of getting better estimates for the future chances of event-types that we’ve seen a small number of times. There is often some structure in the event space that allows us to use other sorts of evidence to improve such predictions — for example, by relating the probability of symbol-sequences to the probabilities of sub-sequences involving the same symbols.
A random sample is drawn from a population of animals of various species. (The theory may also be applied to studies of literary vocabulary, for example.) If a particular species is represented r times in the sample of size N, then r/N is not a good estimate of the population frequency, p, when r is small. Methods are given for estimating p, assuming virtually nothing about the underlying population. The estimates are expressed in terms of smoothed values of the numbers nr (r = 1, 2, 3, …), where nr is the number of distinct species that are each represented r times in the sample. (nr may be described as `the frequency of the frequency r’.) Turing is acknowledged for the most interesting formula in this part of the work. An estimate of the proportion of the population represented by the species occurring in the sample is an immediate corollary. Estimates are made of measures of heterogeneity of the population, including Yule’s ‘characteristic’ and Shannon’s ‘entropy’.
unlike on Supreme Court, he couldn't pick and choose his cases.
~3,000 opinions in his lifetime
Augustus (grandfather) had three sons. One begot August Noble Hand (Learned's cousin, would later serve with him. "Quote Learned and follow 'Gus". One of the others was Samuel, Learned's father.
Originally "Billings Learned Hand". Called "B" by his best friend, "Jay" by his wife and kids.
Studied philosophy at Harvard under William James, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, F.W. Taussig, CE Norton. Lucky bastard.
Friends got into the eating clubs but he didn't.
Editor of the Harvard Advocate (like Sanders!).
Gave class-day speech at graduation. Phi Beta Kappa. Summa cum laude.
"He said he thought with his fingers: He wrote his opinions by hand, never dictated them, on long yellow legal foolscap, scratching each page out in a tiny, crabbed hand, and rewriting three or four or more times before he was satisfied" (9).
No judge more frequently cited by SC than Hand. "Tenth SC justice"
Beloved on a personal level.
"'He was Ariel, and Prometheus, and Jove, with a goodly touch of Mephistopheles, too'—-and, one might add, a bit of Rabelais. He was serious, but not solemn; scholarly, but not pretentious; righteous, but not prudish; disciplined, yet vagrant; skeptical, yet joyous; impatient, yet tolerant. He was a devastating mimic, a hearty storyteller, a fabulous talker—-and a willing listener. He could—-and did—-swear like a stevedore, romp through Gilbert and Sullivan, and nostalgically recall old folk songs he learned as a boy in the Adirondacks."
United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ("C.A. 2"), and American Law Institute.
No absolutes. "The Absolute is mute."
"Skepticism, self-doubt, uncertainty, tolerance, intellectual humility, a willingness to grapple with details, discrimination, a certain toughness of mind—-all were implicit in his distrust of the absolute."
"He knew 'that knowledge is hard to get, that man must break through again and again the thin crust on which he walks, that the certainties of today may become the superstitions of tomorrow, that we have no warrant of assurance save by everlasting readiness to test and test again.'
'Beware then of heathen gods,' was his advice. 'Have no confidence in principles that come to us in the trappings of the eternal.'"
"complex and universals slippery and perilous…truth is a dangerous experiment and man a bungling investigator."
Individual is sacred. Choice.
"Absolute, unbound, knowing no loyalties but a single loyalty, admitting no coercion, its very essence in its affirmation, the self asserts its unassailable right to create all values, what it chooses alone is good. Others may command, it may be forced to comply; but within, its rule is unimpaired; it knows no crompomise; it brooks no equal. That is the unbending spirit we foster, that is the freedom wewiosh to insure. … Implicit [is] the belief that man, and man alone, creates the universe of good and evil; that beyond and beneath all the commandments is the commandment "Be Thyself."
"Life is a dicer's throw; and reason, a smoky torch. We move by what light we have."
"Battleships, aeroplanes, relativity, the proton, neutron, and electron, T.N.T., poison gas, sulfathiazole, The Fifth Symphony, The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Hamlet, Faust, The Critique of Pure Reason, Das Kapital, The Constitution of the United States, The Congress of Industrial Organizations, Huey Long, and The New Deal. All these from just 'monkeying around'!"
"The common law must be content to lag behind the best inspirations of its time until it feels behind it the weight of such general acceptance as will give sanction to its pretension to unquestioned dictation. Yet with this piety must go a taste for courageous experiment, by which alone the law has been built as we have it, an indubitable structure, organic and living."
On legislation:
"First [the judge] must be aware of the difficulty and the hazard. He must hesitate long before imputing more to the "enactment" than he finds in the words, remembering that the "policy" of any law may inhere as much in its limits as in its extent. He must hesitate long before cutting down their literal effect, remembering that the authors presumably said no more than they wanted. He must have the historical capcity to reconstruct the whole setting which evoked the law; the contentions which it reoslved; th objects which it sought; the events which led up to it. But all this is only the beginning, for he must possess the far more expectional power of divination which can peer into the purpose beyond its expression, and bring to fruition that which lay only in flower."
"When a judge tries to find out what the government would have intended which it did not say, he puts into its mouth things which he think sit ought to have said, and that is very close to substituting what he himself thinks right. Let him beware, however, or he will usurp the office of government, even though in a small way he must do so in order to execute its real commands at all."
Detached but not aloof. "Judge as though it weren't your fight."
On constitutional law: "What is 'freedom of speech and of the press'; what is the 'establishment of religion and the free exercise thereof'; what are 'unreasonable searches,' 'due process of law,' and 'equal protection of law … These fundamental canons are not jural concepts at all, in the ordinary sense; and in application they turn out to be no more than admonitions of moderation."
"He called these provisions 'eternal verities emptied of the vital occasions which gave them birth.' The judiciary should not seek 'to fill them from its own bosom.' Under this interpretation, the Bill of Rights is 'merely a counsel of perfection and an ideal of temperance; always to be kept in mind, it is true, but whose infractions were to be treated only as a matter for regret.'"
"On the matter of judicial review of legislation, even Judge Hand's staunchest supporters have deserted him." He doesn't make a large enough role for the judiciary. Too passive, conservative.
But wait: "Judge Hand has suggested that if courts act as a third legislative chamber, reweighing the values and sacrifices already weighed by the appropriate organ of government, judges are likely to lose their independence. The people will recognize that judges are engaged in a political exercise, and in their appointment, their known or expected convictions or predilections will become an important determinant." Boom! [Blog?]
Judge Hand was well aware of the argument most often cited in support of broad judicial review, the protection of a powerless minority against an immoderate or tyrannical majority: "You may ask what thenw ill become of the fundamental principles of equity and fair play which our constitutions enshrine; and whether I seriously belive that unsupported they will serve merely as counsels of moderation. I do not think that anyone can say what will be left of those principles; I do not know whether they will serve only as counsels; but this much I do know—-that a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save; that in a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish."
As one who knew the judicial process intimately, he placed no faith in courts: "[Liberty] is the product, not of institutions, but of a temper, of an attitude towards life… It is idle to look to laws, or courts, or principalities, or powers, to secure it. You may write into your constitutions not ten, but fifty, amendments, and it shall not help a farthing, for casuistry will undermine it as casuistry should, if it have no stay but law."
Probably too extreme a position. The courts needn't do everything, just something.
In his opinions, "There is a polyphony between the samllest detail of fact, thoroughly comprehended and absorbed, and the majestic abstractions of the law writ large. 'This is why he was such a great judge,' wrote Max Ascoli. 'His realm of action was at the boundary of inner and outer life, legal abstraction and tumultuous reality.'" [Might be a good quote for application essay.]
Obscenity:
Regina v. Hicklin — isolated passages, effect on most susceptible members of community. In U.S. v. Kennerley, Hand uses this rule even though he disagrees with it. Saw limited role of his position on a trial court. Later, though, on the Court of Appeals, he overturned Hicklin with Augustus on the Ulysses case.
"I question in the end men will regard that as obscene which is honestly relevant to the adequate expression of innocent ideas, and whether they will not believe that truth and beauty are too precious to society at large to be mutialted in the interests of those most likely to pervert them to base uses."
US v. Levine — "…if the book is not directed at the community at large, it should be judged by its effect on the group for whom it is intended."
Ha: "The first is a reproduction of a collection of photographs, for the most part of nude female savages of different parts of the world; the legitimacy of its pretensions as serious anthropology is, to say the most, extremely tenuous…"
Libel:
Court shouldn't consider the fact that the guy, by bringing the suit, only draws more attention to the embarrassing photo.
Even though there was no statement of truth (which would be a countervailing interest against a claim of libel, since the truth is more important than a person's reputation), the picture is still actionable, since the guy suffered so much for it and did not consent to such a depiction.(29 aug 2011)
Now we have a new paper whose title gets right down to it: “SRT1720 improves survival and healthspan of obese mice”. First time I’ve seen “healthspan” as a word, I might add, and another interesting sidelight is that this appears in Nature Scientific Reports, the publishing group’s open-access experiment. But now to the data:(28 aug 2011)
kat·a·bat·ic/ˌkatəˈbatik/
Adjective: (of a wind) Caused by local downward motion of cool air.
She compares the phenomenon to a person who catches a ride to a dinner party in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, but is later asked to drive home and has difficulty remembering the route. “We’ve found that, even when people are monitoring things very carefully, you just don’t have a good understanding of what’s happening. When you realize there’s a problem, you don’t necessarily know how you got into that state and what to do to correct it.”
Thus, the interpretation-construction distinction opens the door for a partial reconciliation of originalism with living constitutionalism: the Constitution can live in the “construction zone” where the linguistic meaning of the Constitution underdetermines results. We might call the view that original meaning and a living constitutionalism are consistent “compatabilism”—the case for this view has been made by Jack Balkin.
In fact we may not even need to posit polysemy (several meanings for a single word) in this case: we may simply be seeing a sign that the phrase intellectual property is becoming lexicalized (at least in legalese), which means you can no longer compute its meaning from what intellectual means and what property means.(25 aug 2011)
I confess that, when I contemplate the grue riddle, I can’t help but recall the joke about the Anti-Inductivists, who, when asked why they continue to believe that the future won’t resemble the past, when that false belief has brought their civilization nothing but poverty and misery, reply, “because anti-induction has never worked before!”(24 aug 2011)
Results like these provide further evidence—if any was needed—that polynomial-time computability is an extremely natural notion: a “wide target in conceptual space” that one hits even while aiming in purely logical directions.(23 aug 2011)
Briefly, Searle proposed a thought experiment—the details don’t concern us here—purporting Briefly, Searle proposed a thought experiment—the details don’t concern us here—purporting to show that a computer program could pass the Turing Test, even though the program manifestly lacked anything that a reasonable person would call “intelligence” or “understanding.” In response, many critics said that Searle’s argument was deeply misleading, because it implicitly encouraged us to imagine a computer program that was simplistic in its internal operations—something like the giant lookup table described in Section 4.1. And while it was true, the critics went on, that a giant lookup table wouldn’t “truly understand” its responses, that point is also irrelevant. For the giant lookup table is a philosophical fiction anyway: something that can’t even fit in the observable universe! If we instead imagine a compact, efficient computer program passing the Turing Test, then the situation changes drastically. For now, in order to explain how the program can be so compact and efficient, we’ll need to posit that the program includes representations of abstract concepts, capacities for learning and reasoning, and all sorts of other internal furniture that we would expect to find in a mind.(23 aug 2011)
The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false. —Alan M. Turing [126](23 aug 2011)
The best economists say that your automobile shouldn’t cost more than half of your annual income, but we see many Negroes earning $7000 a year paying $5000 for a car. The home, it is said, should not cost more than twice the annual income, but we see many Negroes earning, say, $8000 a year living in a $30,000 home. (Martin Luther King Jr.: An Interview with Playboy | The Gypsy World)(23 aug 2011)
PLAYBOY: What do you mean by “militantly nonviolent”? MARTIN LUTHER KING: I mean to say that a strong man must be militant as well as moderate. He must be a realist as well as an idealist. If I am to merit the trust invested in me by some of my race, I must be both of these things. This is why nonviolence is a powerful as well as a just weapon. If you confront a man who has long been cruelly misusing you, and say, “Punish me, if you will; I do not deserve it, but I will accept it, so that the world will know I am right and you are wrong,” then you wield a powerful and a just weapon. This man, your oppressor, is automatically morally defeated, and if he has any conscience, he is ashamed. Wherever this weapon is used in a manner that stirs a community’s, or a nation’s, anguished conscience, then the pressure of public opinion becomes an ally in your just cause. (Martin Luther King Jr.: An Interview with Playboy | The Gypsy World)(23 aug 2011)
PLAYBOY: Their stated reason for refusing to help was that it was not the proper role of the church to “intervene in secular affairs.” Do you disagree with this view? MARTIN LUTHER KING: Most emphatically. The essence of the Epistles of Paul is that Christians should rejoice at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believe. The projection of a social gospel, in my opinion, is the true witness of a Christian life. This is the meaning of the true ekklesia—the inner, spiritual church. The church once changed society. It was then a thermostat of society. But today I feel that too much of the church is merely a thermometer, which measures rather than molds popular opinion. (Martin Luther King Jr.: An Interview with Playboy | The Gypsy World)(23 aug 2011)
Yes, I do—in Albany, Georgia, in 1962. If I had that to do again, I would guide that community’s Negro leadership differently than I did. The mistake I made there was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it. Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair. It would have been much better to have concentrated upon integrating the buses or the lunch counters. One victory of this kind would have been symbolic, would have galvanized support and boosted morale. But I don’t mean that our work in Albany ended in failure. The Negro people there straightened up their bent backs: You can’t ride a man’s back unless it’s bent. Also, thousands of Negroes registered to vote who never had voted before, and because of the expanded Negro vote in the next election for governor of Georgia—which pitted a moderate candidate against a rabid segregationist—Georgia elected its first governor who had pledged to respect and enforce the law impartially. And what we learned from our mistakes in Albany helped our later campaigns in other cities to be more effective. We have never since scattered our efforts in a general attack on segregation, but have focused upon specific, symbolic objectives. (Martin Luther King Jr.: An Interview with Playboy | The Gypsy World)(23 aug 2011)
One of the most painful experiences I have ever faced was to see her tears when I told her that Funtown was closed to colored children, for I realized that at that moment the first dark cloud of inferiority had floated into her little mental sky, that at that moment her personality had begun to warp with that first unconscious bitterness toward white people (Martin Luther King Jr.: An Interview with Playboy | The Gypsy World)(23 aug 2011)
r, on homeownership: "No one can tell me not to eat cookies."(23 aug 2011)
It's not that I feel like I somehow don't deserve the money. That's the market and I realize there's something to it. It's that I'm just sort of grateful, like, how easy it would have been to roll out into the workplace in that particular year with those particular grades and that particular attitude and just basically flounder for a while, making nothing, going sideways with no sense, at all, of starting a career. But look what happened! How lucky I am and how grateful I have to be.(23 aug 2011)
how this new office mgr started at ga, and how I was introduced to her, and how my reaction, basically, was "why the hell am I being introduced to this person?", and how I must have telegraphed that feeling, and how easy it would have been just to ask her something real, about where she worked or went to school and what she's hoping to get out of the thing, and hey isn't this a weird and interesting scene? Think of what TC would have done.(23 aug 2011)
In the last chapter, Burdick talks about two species of bacteria that live nowhere on this planet except in the absolutely sterile jet propulsion labs in Pasadena, California. We have created these through natural selection. They used to be able to super-heat these things to get rid of bacteria but now, because of the delicate computers and so on, they have to use a strong bleach in order to kill bacteria. As we know from our hospitals, that never kills off everything, just the ones that are weakest. So, living in the labs now are these invasive species, known nowhere else in the world. (TC Boyle on Man and Nature | The Browser)(22 aug 2011)
Our pride is not that we were swept up by the whirlwind of tragic history, but that when we were, we were not found wanting.(22 aug 2011)
but they virtually never get around to telling you exactly what would have to happen to disconfirm their expectations(22 aug 2011)
But just then she spots something and brightens. “Look!” she says. “A German flag.” Sure enough, a flag flies over a small house in a distant village. You can spend days in Germany without seeing a flag. Germans aren’t allowed to cheer for their team in the way other peoples are. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to, just that they must disguise what they are doing. “Patriotism,” she says, “is still taboo. It’s politically incorrect to say, ‘I’m proud to be German.’ ”
It's not laziness that keeps me from cooking more often — it's the lack of mental affordance of recipes(22 aug 2011)
"You know who isn't hard on themselves? Amateurs"(22 aug 2011)
From the phone:
Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Sting — that sort of writing and humor.
A writing problems server.
A list of Seinfeldian questions / comments: what is your take on giving to the homeless? my soap company made the hole bigger. Toilet paper tradeoffs. Do you use a seatbelt in taxis? Favorite day of the week? How do you kill time at an airport? The arms do all the work in a stick figure. Shower technique / order. Texting / IM / phone use among kids. Would you rather be a hunter or gatherer? How do you think you'd keep yourself entertained on the savannah? Did they have things as comfortable as couches in 10,000 BC? Is there anything you can do so well, so reliably well, that you could still do it if your life was on the line? Examples: hitting the bulls-eye with a dart, breaking 170 on the LSAT, picking someone up at a bar.
What sort of personality does one have to have to like oneself (either at a first impression or as a good friend)?
Nearly stabbing myself in countless kitchen situations.
The way that tingle fades as a song grows old, compared to what probably happens with some bach or chopin. Compare relationships. Context: the playlist.
Slavery commercials.
Blackteria.
I should probably use the word "bonehead" more often.
"I'm not going to stop my motherfucking game-playing because of your niggerish ass."
The name Kipling Broeder.
The idea that each generation has to relearn everything will someday look hopelessly primitive. The next big stage.
"W. G. Snuffy Walden kinda needs to get a fucking job."
How the voice in your head changes when something's underlined. What if it had an Indian accent?
Nearly done =~ "Circling for a landing." Nice phrase.
The "Cryptic Carbuncular Bottom" thought experiment.
Paxton Whitehead.
Anus mirabilis. (Brownian motion.) (When GR came to him, in an elevator.)
TWW in a tech startup. Coder talk.
How women's signatures change when they get married.
ET's running / gone up the slide. The cookies are in the quarry. I'm afraid if we keep going in this direction we'll end up with sherpas in the bathtub. I feel like I'm wiping my ass with a catamaran guys. I didn't come to Rio for a shrimp cocktail.
How does the drug approval process work and where do the costs come in?
Sorkin and the energy of excellent people asking for the ball.
"It's like seasickness: you think you're gonna die and everybody else thinks it's just funny."
Comminist Manufesto (a neat spoonerism)
DFW and metaphor talk: "It's not like I'm shaking the straw out of my hair as I walk up to these things" … "just shy of the 'golly the buildings are tall' thing."
J on what sort of girl one should want — the mutual admiration — never belittle (chess).
S's sense of adventure; compare P's.
First ej is first n yrs stored up — shorties want the geyser(22 aug 2011)
From the black notebook:
Notes should be read-heavy, like this Tumblr system, without organization, with bad handwriting. Comparing read-heavy to write-heavy database management. The former kicks complexity down the road.
Searching for words and phrases that you don't know (or have on the tip of your tongue) is inherently difficult because search is based in words and phrases.
How the meta level is a breeding ground for bikeshed talk.
The digital divide: jotting things here and typing them up, organizing them on the computer.
With a single notebook (as opposed to looseleaf pages) you can work in batch mode, as I'm doing here.
Is Aaron Sorkin a racist? Using white guilt to make sentimental black characters, like Charlie, Fitz, the comedian, AFGM, and the rest.
Think of the NY tech scene and the negative space of the "bubble" concept: like BT and the micromechanics of overfunding (and how constraints drive creativity), or GA and the fact that no one's there on a Sunday at 5pm (and what are these people are doing on a Sunday at 5pm?). Think of the ecosystem externalities and how a windfall in the tens of millions, because it's now 100x cheaper to start companies, means a pie that can be sliced so many more times. Don't forget there is an elite cadre, but look at all the hangers-on and parasites. Think of M and my decision not to leave New York (and what that says about New York). Think especially of the irony of TS and Amit and then of his giraffe, and the two weeks it takes to get a prototype cooking. Think of course of my level of skill.
Sorkin's drama isn't necessarily built on character arcs driving to some big event — it's just these dramatic moments, dramatic almost just for drama's sake, that happen to add depth. Like the characters' depth is incidental to the vignettes, which work because they're tightly engineered.
What's interesting about n. is that because he's non-neurotic he's not so afraid to think, and so he probably thinks more often in that special way — a sort of purposeful but playful tumbling — that I only rarely ease into. But he never shows it. Nor does he seem to write it down. What happens to this thought? (Imagine finding notebooks under his bed, tens of composition books packed with little print. What sort of treasure might that be, if one at all?)
In bankruptcy must you sell your assets? What's the real-life equivalent of flipping over those Monopoly cards? Well, in Chapter 7 some property is exempt, and some debts can be discharged, 'scepting things like child support, car loan interest payments, mortgages, property taxes, and student loans. Chapter 7 filers are now means tested to prevent abuse. (Can the petitioner pay back the discharged debt over, say, the next five years, out of disposable income?)
Some tenets and precepts of running an organization: (1) Know everything about everything — web monitoring, what people are saying, the competition (who runs 'em, how far along their product is, what their customers are saying, their funding and cash flow situation), accounting, the code, legal issues (think of how R read all the TOSes), employees (both professional and personal). (2) A culture of hard policies on the important stuff — none of this startup foofery ("as long as the work gets done"): no dicking around, links, news, etc., at work (R); how one should respond to customer messages (and how quickly); all the copy that comes out of the organization; ticketing and commits and documentation and testing and commenting. Pick a process and use it and stick to it assiduously (but keep it dead fucking simple). (3) Milestones and a single giant hierarchical todo list. (4) High expectations and no budging. Think of what happens when an editor gives on a deadline. (5) Arrive earlier and stay later than the team. Respond to their e-mails right away. Set an example like JWF. (6) Ask them what they're worried about, in a way that they'll answer. (7) Do everything like you give a damn. (8) Have a sense of urgency and show it. (9) Use checklists.
My mapping project in Cambridge, and bicycles, and the sort of mode that kicked it off.
The BW office and the "what it's like" of such software companies.
Drills for writers: (1) Fast sentence generation, (2) Transitions, (3) Rewrites of sentences or paragraphs.
Is TWW structured so well that you could use it to teach screenwriting?
FS@BW as a character: a house divide against itself.
Who were the prior tenants of the PF Collins and Son building? What's that weird auditorium?
A simple company directory with pictures, and its role in on-boarding.
S's question to doctors in training: is the body more or less robust than you thought before studying medicine?
Consider the data that big companies give little companies, like, the fact that I can see all this unpublished Economist content. (But surely there are better examples. Think of Gz or 37.)
A daily one-on-one lunch isn't a bad policy. Think, too, of how one-on-ones are structurally a whole lot different than 3+s. How does that relate to my instinct, sometimes, to want to watch something on my own? ("I'm just not eager to turn this solo thing into a social thing.")
Sticking to a routine requires an assertiveness, with yourself, that's just like asking someone for what you want.
FS: "Just cut the check to us and look smart." … "Micromanage yourself so that I don't have to… because you're better at it than I am."
Young people who speak rudely to their parents.
S's care-fulness.
What are those little positions or takes that you carry latently in your brain? How is a thing like that stored? And think of how it can change, like my take on whether it matters if a person can spell. It's a bit that's flipped n times.
Some choice quotes re P and his work: "A front line to the Fascist party." "Government people buy the store." "A meeting about a meeting to send an e-mail. (Question design for a questionnaire.) Just ask the goddamn questions."
Bloomberg was 200 people shy of hitting their quarterly R & D hiring target.
Beer pong six-cup practice session (shots taken to kill the rack): 14, 14, 9, 12, 19, 11, 16, 13, 10, 12, for an average of 13.0.
I have a hunch that young readers in school might be encouraged to underline the most abstract stuff, the most general stuff, the "upshot" sentences, instead of the examples those sentences are based on. Is it possible that they're taught to go after the wordsy stuff? And that they get so good at it that they affine for it and away from the concrete things, the things Feynman would care for? With respect to the wordsy realm, think especially of the YLS kids and the sorts of conversations they seemed drawn to like a marble to the bottom of a bowl.
Think of what Feynman said after Los Alamos in the context of the Freedom tower, the one I can see out my window. Why are you building it when it's going to be destroyed? What kind of honorable stupidity is that?
"I Want to be a Writer" like Halmos wanted to be a mathematician.
The thrill deploy a bugfix during a live demonstration, and what the mere possibility of such an act says about the world we code in.
Do we keep the penny around because of the possibility of massive deflation?
It would be nice if there were more movies with a ride interlude. Of course it would require special seats. But how much fun would that be? Surely a better expense than this 3D nonsense.
Does a life with less love move faster?
Life expectancy should be conditioned on how old you are now. Say that the life expectancy of a male in the US is 72 years old. That number includes (doesn't it?) lots of dead infants. Well, what's the life expectancy for a 24 year-old male, when I've gotten out of that infant mortality gravity well?
Gravity wells are a good general metaphor / image.
The girl on the JZ subway and the AE principle.
Because of this silly and meaningless shape all the things I've wanted won't be wanted back, and that realm is closed to me, and I'm not included in the conversation even though I know just what to say.
For the I Can't Believe It's Not Butter product there should be an "I Can't Believe It's Not [X]" ad campaign, where the ICB version sucks. The tag line should be "Butter: gotta have the real thing."
The meeting with S in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is low and sprawling. Doorman: "You don't have the right address"; "I answer to two people…"; "…not going to run away with the phone. I got ten of them." — "Sorry temporarily cash only." — "Within the last week there have been two rapes in the neighborhood and two more attempted." The people seem fine but the whole place feels and looks sad as hell. God would I hate to live there. Neat to be finally trying the early stops of the subways that seem to arrive in lower Manhattan out of nowhere specked with low unhappy faces. It's not a neighborhood that's nice to walk in, though it does feel like a neighborhood. It's not the dense mess of Manhattan — it's like what you'd get if you cut the buildings down and laid them sideways, and those apartments become shitty little houses, and the businesses anchored on the main drag, wide, with room for cars, like an on-ramp dotted with convenience stores.
The sound of intelligence might just be technical jargon combined with creative colloquialisms, like "putting lipstick on the pig" or "cutting the fat" or "guilding the lily" or "I'm not saber rattling."
My friend Christine is telling her friend about a Korean pop collective and at some point in the conversation shows him the cover of their latest album, which is like a grid of nine portraits. To which the friend says "Oh, she's cute." And Christine tells him, "Those are nine different girls."
My GPA, hiring, clinical vs. actuarial judgement, and giving a damn. There's an essay in there somewhere.
That Fergo thing might be like the typewriter vs. word processor, in that constant feedback might constrain and hedge you.
S's image of an ice cream scoop and the scoops and the tough substance, and how they're all different, all the same.
Here's what I'd ask a neurosurgeon (or a fledgling): How do you think of the different procedures, like a pro golfer and different shot types, or like a pro golfer and different shots? This is a selective profession: how'd you get there? What was the fight like? What's it like to cut a brain? This is their personality, what someone is and what they can be. What a responsibility that must be? How much time is spent in the cutting, and in the looking? What else are you doing: reading? What do neurosurgeons read?
A diet that's helped nine billion women lose ten pounds in one day.
If I'm writing something and I'd like to jot some daily notes about it for folding in later then I might as well try to start a conversation or two about the thing, as conversations like that tend to generate some good ideas.
The idea of writing as a ticket to adventure, in that it gives you a way to cash in — or really, just to justify — exploring. Think of how that relates to scientific field guides, and how the kings and governments and whatever who commissioned exploration would ask the captains, in exchange, (and among other things), for careful copious notes about wildlife and the land.
A Socratic crossing guard.
Semen is just delusion ejecting from your penis.
Compare parsing and following turn-by-turn directions to having a destination and a map, and think of structured vs. goal-directed AI a la Rodney Brooks and his subsumption architecture.
Might the best way to teach programming be an ORIC-1-style Python DSL that can paint an HTML5 Canvas?
In 200332% of systemwide cable customers paid in cash.
What is the most effective position to be in to write notes while walking? Has anyone figured this out?
Think more about cathedrals.
Is T-L-S not interesting to n.? Why? How is that related to a more general conservatism?
How that well-educated twenty-something had wedding invitations on her fridge.
What it was about my second lesson with A, and LPTHW, that was pedagogically disturbing / enlightening. How what I was after was something truly problem-based, inductive — introducing concepts with no context: building the context up from nothing but a question. Example: quips[randint(0, len(quips) - 1] and all that goes into that.
A TV show set in an airport.
How scores digitize an analog contest (in sports).
The flight attendant and his ice cube scoop, and the way he let the water drip before pouring, and the pleasure of people who do their jobs well, and the crushing frustrating sadness of the people who don't. Think about those little sandwich shops with the quick cashiers, and the guy at LB who toweled up after every sandwich, and that horribly slow lady at the Starbucks.
I bet there are submarines in the East River with a horrible mission, missiles at the ready.
Alienation in the New York subway and how what you're seeing is people on their way somewhere.
The french for "body wash" is "gel douche."
If there were no birds would we have invented airplanes?
"I have a hard time understanding people who don't think exactly like me." -P
You lived for n years, so why are you so keen to take and share and need? Like somehow this stuff is just activated in relationships.
Two weeks in British Columbia: Booze at Tree, bike round town; Mt. Work hike, moss foot climb; Sooke Coast Trail, moment lost, trails gnarly; Gear up at thrift stores, squash hard; Drive 1 to 4 to secret camp off a logging road, thirteen black bears, camp, fire, bald eagle, cheddar smokies; 6:30am with the crows, breakfast and coffee, Greenpoint, secret beach, hobo cave, beach walk 16km, food, burn, beach again, cut, knife, five agro crags one-handed, tide up, hospital, "ooh la la!", restaurant; Lick the wounds, Phoenix; Finlayson hike, lost on the way down, BBQ at JVC's; Cowichan River Provincial Park, ford the river, m & j in the mix, "fookin' prawns!", Prairie Inn, Spoons, Cowabboggan Lake deadly hike — "stop… fucking… running!", bike mish (X-men castle, Thetis lake), pain.
My notes as passive rather than genitive and active.
Writing and hacking on side projects is much higher leverage than reading or whatever.
This "okay" stuff with R Ferris and JVC, and what it says about their conscientiousness.
M & drunk driving joke & Elyse & assuming the worst — and wanting to think little of you & wanting to sanction (related, of course, to wanting to feel indignant).
This ceaseless thanking and apologizing seems to be about keeping at bay a natural hostility, the thanking especially. It's too phatic.
Imagine swatting a fly. You're swinging something at it. Is the event unfolding in a mental time — for the fly — that makes your incoming implement seem hopelessly slow? (Like bullet time.) Compare the time scale of trees, of emergencies, and so on. Think of Permutation City.
To be truly self-reliant — is that even possible? Yes in a certain sense, but really no — what of your provisions, products, know-how? The goal maybe should be at the margin.
The etiology of gunk character is like a Robert Eddy — cheeky in the main, smart, well-meaning, a bit of mischief. The story revolves around a math dept, as these guys are getting stupider. Robert is brought in — after a few trials with others — to sort it out. The dept and by extension the schools is becoming a laughingstock. There are embarrassments at conferences. — It comes down to a joke they tell, the implications of which lead all these topologists (say) to the same train of thought, which, Robert discovers, degrades their brains. The thing is, this ToT isn't especially mathematical… and the mathematicians are not smart enough to keep it to themselves. They start getting conspiratorial.
P, on commuting from Duncan: "A snowy day on the Malahat and you're pooched like a dingle."
A special kind of tree where the trunk opens down into a house framed by the roots, connected to others as a graph G.
Growing up and learning in more and more detail what happens when people get drunk, and using that knowledge to retrospectively evaluate relations you had as a kid.
Alternative for a watch — a bracelet, thin, loose, that fades from green to red at the fifteen minute mark, basically, with the hour marked by a hatch.
Dream: Bill Pullman, a key, secret room, brothers and 'ship, Ben Franklin (played by Giamatti), Hofstadter, subway.
A list of things I know I don't know and would be keen to find out: how catheters work, clouds forming, what a day in the life of a bird is like, how the toilets on planes are rigged up, how wheat was domesticated, how a family farm operates, logging, how to do more hardcore camping, how a NYT story is reported, what makes a non-iron shirt smooth, how to construct a crossword, why dinosaurs got so big, what you can do to all the pieces of a buffalo, how a good shoe is made, what denim is, how to make a hiking trail, what tree growth looks like from the inside, how taxes are processed, what dbs look like at 10^8, basic house construction, why the law of large numbers works, what the hiring process for dad looked like, how the dartboard was invented, what pretty young girls are thinking, whether the typical commercial flight challenges the pilots, the chance I'd crash a jet if given control midway through the flight (compare the cases with and without the radio)…
druggyostasis
"…fascinated by the feelings of women…" — that the way there is empathy, and really giving a shit, and taking their personhood whole, thinking here of G and his falling fast and for real and his unphatic "how's your night going?"
It might be smart to get a pocket knife, headlamp, sleeping bag, and water bottle.(22 aug 2011)
to jot notes during the day and, at night, to type them up — if only as a way to kick off a bout of writing(22 aug 2011)
When asked to name a scientist, Americans are stumped. In one recent survey, the top choice, at 47 percent, was Einstein, who has been dead since 1955, and the next, at 23 percent, was “I don’t know.” In another survey, only 4 percent of respondents could name a living scientist. (Groups Call for Scientists to Engage the Body Politic - NYTimes.com)(21 aug 2011)
The Peripatetics were members of a school of philosophy in ancient Greece. Their teachings derived from their founder, the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, and Peripatetic is a name given to his followers. The school originally derived its name Peripatos from the peripatoi (περίπατοι “colonnades”) of the Lyceum gymnasium in Athens where the members met. A similar Greek word peripatetikos (Greek: περιπατητικός) refers to the act of walking, and as an adjective, “peripatetic” is often used to mean itinerant, wandering, meandering, or walking about. After Aristotle’s death, a legend arose that he was a “peripatetic” lecturer — that he walked about as he taught — and the designation Peripatetikos came to replace the original Peripatos.
If you brought the Sun down to the size of a white blood cell (7 micrometres), and then brought everything else down to scale, our galaxy, the Milky Way, would be the size of the continental U.S.A.
The rendering engine will start parsing the HTML document and turn the tags to DOM nodes in a tree called the “content tree”.
It will parse the style data, both in external CSS files and in style elements.
The styling information together with visual instructions in the HTML will be used to create another tree - the render tree.
The render tree contains rectangles with visual attributes like color and dimensions.
The rectangles are in the right order to be displayed on the screen.
After the construction of the render tree it goes through a “layout” process.
This means giving each node the exact coordinates where it should appear on the screen.
The next stage is painting - the render tree will be traversed and each node will be painted using the UI backend layer.
It’s important to understand that this is a gradual process. For better user experience, the rendering engine will try to display contents on the screen as soon as possible.
It will not wait until all HTML is parsed before starting to build and layout the render tree.
Parts of the content will be parsed and displayed, while the process continues with the rest of the contents that keeps coming from the network.
To no one but a German is Hamburg an obvious place to spend a vacation, but it happened to be a German holiday, and Hamburg was overrun by German tourists. When I asked the hotel concierge what there was to see in his city, he had to think for a few seconds before he said, “Most people just go to the Reeperbahn.” The Reeperbahn is Hamburg’s red-light district, the largest red-light district in Europe, according to one guidebook, though you have to wonder how anyone figured that out. And the Reeperbahn, as it happens, was why I was there.
Perhaps because they have such a gift for creating difficulties with non-Germans, the Germans have been on the receiving end of many scholarly attempts to understand their collective behavior. In this vast and growing enterprise, a small book with a funny title towers over many larger, more ponderous ones. Published in 1984 by a distinguished anthropologist named Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder set out to describe the German character through the stories that ordinary Germans liked to tell one another. Dundes specialized in folklore, and in German folklore, as he put it, “one finds an inordinate number of texts concerned with anality. Scheisse (shit), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass).… Folksongs, folktales, proverbs, riddles, folk speech—all attest to the Germans’ longstanding special interest in this area of human activity.”
He then proceeded to pile up a shockingly high stack of evidence to support his theory. There’s a popular German folk character called der Dukatenscheisser (“The Money Shitter”), who is commonly depicted crapping coins from his rear end. Europe’s only museum devoted exclusively to toilets was built in Munich. The German word for “shit” performs a vast number of bizarre linguistic duties—for instance, a common German term of endearment was once “my little shit bag.” The first thing Gutenberg sought to publish, after the Bible, was a laxative timetable he called a “Purgation-Calendar.” Then there are the astonishing number of anal German folk sayings: “As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!,” to select but one of the seemingly endless examples.
The deepest insight about this is captured in one startling point made in the book. Before container shipping, most cargo transport involved either raw materials or completely finished products. After container shipping, the center of gravity shifted to intermediate (supply chain) goods: parts and subassemblies. Multinationals learned the art of sourcing production in real time to take advantage of supply chain and currency conditions, and moving components for assembly and delivery at the right levels of disaggregation. Thanks to container shipping, manufacturers of things as messy and complicated as refrigerators, computers and airplanes are able to manage their material flows with almost the same level of ease that the power sector manages power flows on the electric grid through near real-time commodity trading and load-balancing.
Let’s wrap up by looking at how the narrow world of container shipping ended up disrupting the rest of the world. The big insight here is not just that shipping costs dropped precipitously, but that shipping became vastly more reliable and simple as a consequence. The 25% transportation fraction of global goods in 1960 is almost certainly an understatement because most producers simply could not ship long distances at all: stuff got broken, stolen and lost, and it took nightmarish levels of effort to even make that happen. Instead of end-to-end shipping with central consolidation, you had shipping departments orchestrating ad hoc journeys, dealing with dozens of carriers, forwarding agents, transport lines and border controls.
Today, shipping has gotten to a level of point-to-point packet-switched efficiency, where the shipper needs to do a hundredth of the work and can expect vastly higher reliability, on-time performance, far lower insurance costs, and lower inventories. That means a qualitatively new level of thinking, one driven by the axiom that realistically, the entire world is your market, no matter what you make. The dependability of the container-plumbing makes you rethink every business.
In short, container shipping, through its efficiency, was a big cause of the disaggregation of vertically integrated industry structures and the globalization of supply chains along Toyota-like just-in-time models. Just as the Web (1.0 and 2.0) sparked a whole new world of business models, container shipping did as well.
This is the subplot that interested me the most. Containerization represented a technological force that old-style manual-labor-intensive ports and their cities simply were not capable of handling. The case of New York vs. Newark/Elizabeth is instructive. New York, the greatest port of the previous era of shipping, was an economy that practically lived off shipping, with hundreds of thousands employed directly or indirectly by the sector. Other industries ranging from garments to meatpacking inhabited New York primarily because the inefficiencies of shipping made it crucial to gain any possible efficiency through close location.
Containerization changed all that. While New York local politics around ports was struggling with irrelevant issues, it was about to be blindsided by containers. The bistate Port Authority, finding itself cut out of New York power games, saw an opportunity when McLean shipping was looking to build the first northeastern container handling wharf. This required clean sheet design (parallel parking wharfs instead of piers perpendicular to shore), and plenty of room for stacking and cranes. While nominally supposed to work towards the interests of both states, the Port Authority essentially bet on Newark, and later, the first modern container port at Elizabeth. The result was drastic: New York cargo traffic collapsed over just a decade, while Newark went from nothing to gigantic. Today, you can see signs of this: if you ever fly into Newark, look out the window at the enormous maze of rail, truck and sea traffic. The story repeated itself around the US and the world. Famous old ports like London, Liverpool and San Francisco declined. In their place arose fewer and far larger ports in oddball places: Felixstowe in the UK, Rotterdam, Seattle, Charleston, Singapore, and so forth.
This geographic churn had a pattern. Not only did old displace new, but there were far fewer new ports, and they were far larger and with a different texture. Since container ports are efficient, industry didn’t need to locate near them, and they became vast box parking lots in otherwise empty areas. The “left-behind” cities not only faced a loss of their port-based economies, but also saw their industrial base flee to the hinterland. Cities like New York and San Francisco had to rethink their entire raison d’etre, figure out what to do with abandoned shorelines, and reinvent themselves as centers of culture and information work.
"15 going on… on the doorstep of my sexual prime." … "sure, I was just breaking down the game film."(15 aug 2011)
At heart, containerization is a financial story, and nothing illustrates this better than some stark numbers. At the beginning of the story, total port costs ate up a whopping 48% (or $1163 of $2386) of an illustrative shipment of one truckload of medicine from Chicago to Nancy, France, in 1960. In more comprehensible terms, an expert quoted in the book explains: “a four thousand mile shipment might consume 50 percent of its costs in covering just the two ten-mile movements through two ports.” For many goods then, shipping accounted for nearly 25% of total cost for a product sold beyond its local market. Fast forward to today: the book quotes economists Edward Glaeser and Janet Kohlhase: “It is better to assume that moving goods is essentially costless than to assume that moving goods is an important component of the production process.” At this moment in time, this is almost literally true: due to the recession. These sort of odd dynamics are due to the fact that world shipping infrastructure changes very slowly but inexorably (and cyclically) towards higher, more aggregated capacity, and lower costs. This is due to the highly capital-intensive nature of the business, and the extreme economies of scale (leading to successively larger ships in every generation). Ships, though they are moving vehicles, are better thought of as somewhere between pieces of civic infrastructure (due to the large legacy impact of government regulation and subsidies) and fabs in the semiconductor industry (which, like shipping, undergoes a serious extinction event and consolidation with every trough in the business cycle
Even though the Internet revolution, spaceflight, GPS and biotechnology don’t feature in this book, the story teases out the DNA of globalization in a way grand sweeping syntheses never could. Think of the container story as the radioactive tracer in the body politic of globalization.
"what you do in my job if you only had a year to live and no one knew it"(10 aug 2011)
In this respect we can compare him with another great late 18th century figure – whom I happen to deeply admire personally – and that’s Casanova. Both of them were fascinated by the feelings of women. They were fascinated by women as individuals. And they needed the presence of the feminine in their lives.
It is also not measured in terms of 8% returns on the global stock market. That is a Schumpeterian growth measure. For that model of growth to continue would be a case of civilizational cancer (“growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” as Edward Abbey put it).
I am not sure who first came up with the term Peak Attention, but the analogy to Peak Oil is surprisingly precise. It has its critics, but I think the model is basically correct.
Peak Oil refers to a graph of oil production with a maximum called Humboldt’s peak, that represents peak oil production. The theory behind it is that new oil reserves become harder to find over time, are smaller in size, and harder to mine. You have to look harder and work harder for every new gallon, new wells run dry faster than old ones, and the frequency of discovery goes down. You have to drill more.
There is certainly plenty of energy all around (the Sun and the wind, to name two sources), but oil represents a particularly high-value kind.
Attention behaves the same way. Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.
But as you find and capture most of the wild attention, new pockets of attention become harder to find. Worse, you now have to cannibalize your own previous uses of captive attention. Time for TV must be stolen from magazines and newspapers. Time for specialized entertainment must be stolen from time devoted to generalized entertainment.
Sure, there is an equivalent to the Sun in the picture. Just ask anyone who has tried mindfulness meditation, and you’ll understand why the limits to attention (and therefore the value of time) are far further out than we think.
The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of the equivalent of oil: high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel.
Many people misunderstood the fundamental nature of Schumpeterian growth as being fueled by ideas rather than time. Ideas fueled by energy can free up time which can then partly be used to create more ideas to free up more time. It is a positive feedback cycle, but with a limit. The fundamental scarce resource is time. There is only one Earth worth of space to colonize. Only one fossil-fuel store of energy to dig out. Only 24 hours per person per day to turn into capitive attention.
Among the people who got it wrong was my favorite visionary, Vannevar Bush, who talked of science: the endless frontier. To believe that there is an arguably limitless supply of valuable ideas waiting to be discovered is one thing. To argue that they constitute a limitless reserve of value for Schumpeterian growth to deliver is to misunderstand how ideas work: they are only valuable if attention is efficiently directed to the right places to discover them and energy is used to turn them into businesses, and Arthur-Clarke magic.
The steam engine was a fundamentally different beast than the sailing ship. For all its sophistication, the technology of sail was mostly a very-refined craft, not an engineering discipline based on science. You can trace a relatively continuous line of development, with relatively few new scientific or mathematical ideas, from early Roman galleys, Arab dhows and Chinese junks, all the way to the amazing Tea Clippers of the mid 19th century (Mokyr sketches out the story well, as does Mahan, in more detail).
Steam power though was a scientific and engineering invention. Sailing ships were the crowning achievements of the age of craft guilds. Steam engines created, and were created by engineers, marketers and business owners working together with (significantly disempowered) craftsmen in genuinely industrial modes of production. Scientific principles about gases, heat, thermodynamics and energy applied to practical ends, resulting in new artifacts. The disempowerment of craftsmen would continue through the Schumpeterian age, until Fredrick Taylor found ways to completely strip mine all craft out of the minds of craftsmen, and put it into machines and the minds of managers. It sounds awful when I put it that way, and it was, in human terms, but there is no denying that the process was mostly inevitable and that the result was vastly better products.
Two images hint at its actual globe-straddling, 10x-Walmart influence: the image of the Boston Tea Partiers dumping crates of tea into the sea during the American struggle for independence, and the image of smoky opium dens in China. One image symbolizes the rise of a new empire. The other marks the decline of an old one.
The East India Company supplied both the tea and the opium.
At a broader level, the EIC managed to balance an unbalanced trade equation between Europe and Asia whose solution had eluded even the Roman empire. Massive flows of gold and silver from Europe to Asia via the Silk and Spice routes had been a given in world trade for several thousand years. Asia simply had far more to sell than it wanted to buy. Until the EIC came along
A very rough sketch of how the EIC solved the equation reveals the structure of value-addition in the mercantilist world economy.
The EIC started out by buying textiles from Bengal and tea from China in exchange for gold and silver.
Then it realized it was playing the same sucker game that had trapped and helped bankrupt Rome.
Next, it figured out that it could take control of the opium industry in Bengal, trade opium for tea in China with a significant surplus, and use the money to buy the textiles it needed in Bengal. Guns would be needed.
As a bonus, along with its partners, it participated in yet another clever trade: textiles for slaves along the coast of Africa, who could be sold in America for gold and silver.
For this scheme to work, three foreground things and one background thing had to happen: the corporation had to effectively take over Bengal (and eventually all of India), Hong Kong (and eventually, all of China, indirectly) and England. Robert Clive achieved the first goal by 1757. An employee of the EIC, William Jardine, founded what is today Jardine Matheson, the spinoff corporation most associated with Hong Kong and the historic opium trade. It was, during in its early history, what we would call today a narco-terrorist corporation; the Taliban today are kindergarteners in that game by comparison. And while the corporation never actually took control of the British Crown, it came close several times, by financing the government during its many troubles.
The background development was simpler. England had to take over the oceans and ensure the safe operations of the EIC.
in fact the extinction of behavior by aversive consequences can be demonstrated in imperfectly rational organisms ranging from flatworms to sophomores.(08 aug 2011)
This reminds me of something that happened when I was just a bit younger… My girlfriend and I were graduating from pharmacy school and she was applying for residency positions (yes, they have those for pharmacists). Well, she found out she got the one she really wanted and so that night we went out to a nice dinner to celebrate. We did it up like you would expect a happy couple to - nice bottle of wine, share an appetizer and dessert, etc. We were still living on loans at the time and so in my head I was keeping track of about how much the meal was going to run me at the end of the night (for better or worse - keep in mind we were in college at the time). We had easily cleared a hundred bucks (quite the meal for college students who usually eat $7 sandwiches or more likely cook for themselves!), and when it was time for the bill, our waitress told us “The couple that was sitting over there paid for it.”
!
You wanna talk about made our day? Try made our week. We had seen the older couple earlier, but we didn’t know them, and they were gone by the time we got our bill. We couldn’t even thank them, and we were just so… shocked. Since then, whenever we go out for a nice meal, I look for a young couple who looks happy and in love, just waiting to return that favor.(08 aug 2011)
Throughout his turbulent and peripatetic life, Grant Hadwin demonstrated a level of woodsmanship and an imperviousness to the elements worthy of a character from the pages of Robert Service or Jack London. His wife, Margaret, from whom he has been separated for a decade, described him as “indestructible,” an opinion shared by many who have known him. “Basically, you’re dealing with a person who, with very few resources, could be dropped anywhere on earth and come up smelling like a rose,” Cory Delves, one of Hadwin’s former bosses, told me.
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.
They’re necessary, because when we talk about large, full-text archives empowered by text analytical tools and visualizations, we’re really talking about trying to make procedures traditionally thought of as batch-processing jobs and importing them into a world in which, as Jacob Nielson famously noted, you have eight seconds to do something interesting.
In academia, publishing stands as the final warrant of your expertise – a certification that is even more powerful than holding an advanced degree in the subject. In fact, any expert on any subject appearing on any television program you might see “is the author of” something. That’s why they’re experts. They’re published. (Anthologize It)(06 aug 2011)
the idea that language is for power users and pictures and index fingers are for those poor besotted fools who just want toast in the morning is an extremely retrograde idea from which we should strive to emancipate ourselves. (The Mythical Man-Finger)(06 aug 2011)
There are other aspects of tacit knowledge that are about intuition, like our ability to make perceptual discriminations, so as we get experience, we can see things that we couldn’t see before.
For example, if you ever watch the Olympics and you watch a diving competition, the diver goes off the high board, and the TV commentators are there and the person didn’t do a belly flop, dove in, looks clean, and they’re saying, “Look at the splash. The splash was bigger than it should have been, the judges are sure to catch that”, and what happened was the diver’s ankles came apart just as she was entering the water. Then they show it in instant replay, and sure enough, that’s what happened. But the commentator saw it as it happened. To a viewer like me, that’s invisible. I just saw the dive. But they know where to look, and they know the probable trouble spots, or they know the difficult aspects. That’s part of the patterns that they’ve built up — to know how to direct their attention so they can see the anomalies. They see it as it’s happening, not in replay. You can’t tell somebody over the phone what to look for. You can say it after the fact, but they see it while it’s going on. That ability to make fine discriminations is a part of tacit knowledge, and a part of intuitive knowing.
Another part is pattern recognition. If you go to a friend’s house, and the friend for some reason has an album out, and there’s a picture from when they were in the fourth grade, you can look at the picture, and you look at all the faces, and you say, “That’s you, isn’t it?” And most of the time you get it right. Now, the face doesn’t look like the face of your friend right now, but we see the facial resemblance, we see the relationship of the eyes, and the eyebrows, and the nose, and all of that. We just have a pattern recognition that we’re able to apply. That’s another aspect of tacit knowledge
A third aspect, if we have a lot of experience and we see things, we can sense typicality, that means we can see anomalies, and that means that we have a sense something is not right here, something doesn’t feel right. And then we start to look for the specifics about what it is that’s gone wrong, and that’s another aspect of tacit knowledge that we depend on to alert us to possible danger.
Another aspect of tacit knowledge is our mental models of how things work. Mental models are just the stories, the frames that we have to explain causal relationships: if this happens, that will happen, and that will happen, and we build these kinds of internal representations, these mental models about how things work.
Clearly, this work is only of historical interest now, but that interest is
considerable, since the big, synoptic picture of the nervous system which it
draws is still pretty much the one neuroscientists use. It goes (in somewhat
modernized language) as follows. The nervous system exists in animals to
control muscles, i.e., comparatively rapid motion. Some motions (like those of
the heart, lungs, and bowels) are to be kept up continually in more or less
steady rhythms; others are sporadic, adaptive responses to circumstances. The
later are triggered by sensory organs, and the nervous system provides both
what we now call “pattern generators” for rhythms, and the links connecting
sensory organs to effector organs, especially muscle fibers. The key to making
all this work is that nerve cells transmit impulses to each other, which can,
depending on the relations between the cells, either excite or inhibit further
transmission on the part of the downstream cells; neurons are themselves
excited by sensory cells, and can cause muscle cells to contract. The
character of the interaction between neurons depends, somehow, on what goes on
at the synapses between them, and it is asymmetry at the synapses which makes
the propagation of nerve impulses go in only one direction. To produce useful,
adaptive responses, each sensor generally must be able to control multiple
effectors; conversely, each effector is generally under the partial control of
multiple sensors. This many-to-many linkage means that the nervous system must
be a network (a word Sherrington uses, e.g., towards the ends of Lectures IV
and VI), where what we would now call functional and effective connectivity
changes dynamically. The “integrative action” of his title consists of
coordinating the effector responses to sensory stimuli, sometimes
cooperatively, sometimes antagonistically (as when different reflexes would
move the same body parts in different ways). Some of this can be handled in
comparatively local and stereotyped ways, which is more or less what goes on in
spinal-cord reflexes, but in an intact, healthy animal, the pre-eminent organ
of integration is the brain.(05 aug 2011)
As the siege wore on, two factions developed within the FBI,[18] one believing negotiation to be the answer, the other, force. Increasingly aggressive techniques were used to try to force the Davidians out (for instance, sleep deprivation of the inhabitants by means of all-night broadcasts of recordings of jet planes, pop music, chanting and the screams of rabbits being slaughtered). (Waco siege - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(05 aug 2011)
Precision is the reason. It was Lewis’ meaning. While other amazing jumpers could not make consistently legal jumps — they would often foul by the smallest margins — Lewis was almost freakish in his exactness. “The way I looked at it,” he says, “fouling was unacceptable. That’s all. Unacceptable. And so I didn’t foul. Think about it: If you foul, it doesn’t count. I would hear people say, ‘Oh, I had a long foul.’ No you didn’t. You didn’t have a jump. That was my attitude. You cannot foul.”
As they stare at the singer who has abandoned the melody in favor of melismatically emoting, or the guitar player who has put his foot on the monitor and thrown his hair back to squintily wee a mishmash of pentatonic drivel, people don’t understand that I’m making their backsides wiggle and bringing us all together in funky communion.
I had a similar idea about a year ago and got as far as you did with similar results. My goal was to create a phone app that you could prop up next to a chess board that would record the moves for a speed chess game by taking a few snapshots a second.
The ultimate goal was that eventually you could tie in this input to a chess engine to get a realtime scoreboard of which side is “winning” based off the engine’s analysis.
Unfortunately the piece detection at that speed didn’t work out too well with the code I wrote. It’d probably have to be rewritten in OpenCV which is optimized for this type of thing (and even has a find chessboard function)(05 aug 2011)
After the war, a friend showed Hathcock a passage written by Ernest Hemingway: “Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and like it, never really care for anything else thereafter.” He copied Hemingway’s words on a piece of paper. “He got that right,” Hathcock said. “It was the hunt, not the killing.”[8] Hathcock said in a book written about his career as a sniper: “I like shooting, and I love hunting. But I never did enjoy killing anybody. It’s my job. If I don’t get those bastards, then they’re gonna kill a lot of these kids dressed up like Marines. That’s the way I look at it.”(03 aug 2011)
Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored - contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man - such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care - such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance - such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.
Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND(03 aug 2011)
Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored(03 aug 2011)
geoff dyer: "It could be argued that this is essentially an academic habit, and that Fried is faithfully observing the expected conventions — so faithfully that he has become an unconscious apostate. If academia elevates scholarly and impersonal inquiry above the kind of nutty, fictional, navel-gazing monologues of Nicholson Baker, then Fried is at once its high camp apotheosis and its disintegration into mere manner."(02 aug 2011)
This reasoning applies more generally: the prior can be divided into one part which refers to the identifiable parameters, and another which refers to the purely-identifiable parameters, and learning only updates the former.(01 aug 2011)
Parfit at great length discusses optimific principles, namely which specifications of rule consequentialism and Kantian obligations can succeed, given strategic behavior, collective action problems, non-linearities, and other tricks of the trade.(29 jul 2011)
Though we have been building and programming computing machines for about 60 years and have learned a great deal about composition and abstraction, we have just begun to scratch the surface.
A mammalian neuron takes about ten milliseconds to respond to a stimulus. A driver can respond to a visual stimulus in a few hundred milliseconds, and decide an action, such as making a turn. So the computational depth of this behavior is only a few tens of steps. We don’t know how to make such a machine, and we wouldn’t know how to program it.
The human genome — the information required to build a human from a single, undifferentiated eukariotic cell — is about 1GB. The instructions to build a mammal are written in very dense code, and the program is extremely flexible. Only small patches to the human genome are required to build a cow or a dog rather than a human. Bigger patches result in a frog or a snake. We don’t have any idea how to make a description of such a complex machine that is both dense and flexible.(29 jul 2011)
The modulations in voice (and therefore sensation and thought) of a sudden turn, a speeding up, for example—where pitch rises without my having intended it, so it makes it too hard for any subsequent piece to rise above that—oh, it’s endless, really. But those sorts of things. Sometimes I use different colored pens to track it—the pitch, especially, the modulation of tone. Not to mention the nightmare of parsing out all the stress points—upon which the whole structure depends.
INTERVIEWER
So you revise a great deal?
GRAHAM
I’d say I spend ninety percent of my time in revision. It’s a craziness. There are sometimes maybe thirty variants of the lineation of a stanza. Getting “far enough away” to grow the new set of ears required to hear the poem outside of the “way you intended it to sound”—to hear what it will really sound like (and in other words mean and feel) to a stranger is quite a trick. Sometimes it means just putting the thing away and not reading it for a long time. Long enough for its intended music to fade from memory. Then you can read it “clean” to hear if you have anything resembling the music you thought you had. But you have to be right on top of it in that first “clean” read, because it takes no time at all for you to be working with a muddy text, one full of what you think is there, which you can’t sort out from what is there. That’s why keeping all the drafts and keeping them present at once is important to me.(28 jul 2011)
…of literally being “double” while pregnant—being a person housing another, truly other, person—another soul than one’s own, another body, another destiny, a different heart.(28 jul 2011)
Each article’s headline is brief and opaque (i.e. “Race to the bottom” or “An empire built on sand“) or non sequiturs (i.e. “No, these are special puppies” or “Cue the fish“). Sometimes the headlines read like the Old Spice guy wrote them (“I’m on a horse”), but that’s part of dressing up what could otherwise be dull subject matter. The non sequiturs force you to read on just so you can understand what they’re talking about.
The sub-header is all business. There’s no fat and they read like well-crafted tweets. For an article on genetic testing, one reads, “The personal genetic-testing industry is under fire, but happier days lie ahead”. The subheader is usually one or two sentences and plainly states the paper’s view on the issue (“Google has joined Verizon in lobbying to erode net neutrality“). I really like this method because at bottom all journalists have an opinion, so why not be transparent and lay it bare? By laying out the conclusion in a couple sentences upfront, it also allows the reader to get something even if she’s just paging through.(28 jul 2011)
For us Americans, the words of the Declaration have become central to our sense of nationhood. Because the United States is composed of so many immigrants and so many different races and ethnicities, we can never assume our identity as a matter of course. The nation has had to be invented. At the end of the Declaration, the members of the Continental Congress could only “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” There was nothing else but themselves that they could dedicate themselves to—no patria, no fatherland, no nation as yet. In comparison with the 235 year-old United States, many states in the world today are new, some of them created within fairly recent past. Yet many of these states, new as they may be, are under-girded by peoples who had a pre-existing sense of their ethnicity, their nationality. In the case of the United States, the process was reversed: We Americans were a state before we were a nation, and much of our history has been an effort to define that nationality. (July Fourth’s Significance As Our Independence Day Should Not Be Forgotten. | The New Republic)(21 jul 2011)
But justice is not all of morality; there remains a circle of intensity which through its emphasis on the particular and the concrete continues to reflect what I have identified as the source of all sense of value-our sense of self.(21 jul 2011)
In the final scene of the comic book, Feynman is walking on a mountain trail with his friend Danny Hillis. Hillis says, “I’m sad because you’re going to die.” Feynman replies, “Yeah, that bugs me sometimes too. But not as much as you think. See, when you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you’ve told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway. Hey! I bet I can show you a better way home.” And Hillis is left alone on the mountain.
He never showed the slightest resentment when I published some of his ideas before he did. He told me that he avoided disputes about priority in science by following a simple rule: “Always give the bastards more credit than they deserve.”
He asks his father at the playground, “Why does [the ball] keep moving?” His father says, “The reason the ball keeps rolling is because it has ‘inertia.’ That’s what scientists call the reason…, but it’s just a name. Nobody really knows what it means.” His father was a traveling salesman without scientific training, but he understood the difference between giving a thing a name and knowing how it works. He ignited in his son a lifelong passion to know how things work.
The routine produces. But each day, nevertheless, when you try to get started you have to transmogrify, transpose yourself; you have to go through some kind of change from being a normal human being, into becoming some kind of slave.
I simply don’t want to break through that membrane. I’d do anything to avoid it. You have to get there and you don’t want to go there because there’s so much pressure and so much strain and you just want to stay on the outside and be yourself. And so the day is a constant struggle to get going.
And if somebody says to me, You’re a prolific writer—it seems so odd. It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.
The fundamental thing is that writing teaches writing. And you always get this question from people, and they say some version of the idea that writing can’t be taught. And the thing is, yeah, you can’t throw a firecracker on the ground and up comes a writer. But you can teach writing in the same way that you can coach swimming. When I was a swimming instructor at Keewaydin, all the kids I taught could already swim. Every single one of them was a swimmer. But as they moved through the water they had different levels of efficiency. You can talk to them about breathing and their rhythm and their arms and legs.
A teacher of writing can do that—as long as the teacher always bears in mind that writers are all unique. It seems a pointless exercise if you’re trying to teach somebody to write the way you do. You just comment on what they’re doing, and I think there’s a net utility in it.
Two or three years later. I just kept getting in deeper and deeper. I had a terrible time. When I wrote The Curve of Binding Energy, Ted Taylor and others could lead me through a little corner of physics and could make certain things clear to me. Whereas in this thing, every time you turn up one thing you get to another. Stratigraphy, structure, tectonics, brrrrr! And if you’re going to do that trip across the country, you can’t ignore any of it! So I was really scrambling. When I went with Anita to the Delaware Water Gap, I was scribbling notes, and she was talking. We spent hours there—all day I scribbled. I did not understand anything that I was writing down. And the interesting thing was that about two and a half years later, when I wrote In Suspect Terrain, by that time I could read that stuff. I understood what it said. And I hadn’t understood it when I made the notes.
That first year it sank in how far over my head I was. The next two years were ’79 and ’80, and I really was unhappy. I thought I was in a cave and I couldn’t get out. It was just too big a thing.
I’ve always thought that the thing I bring to my subjects—one thing—is a fresh eye. And the fresh eye is important, because you’re learning. Certain pieces you can only do once. You can only introduce lacrosse once. The fresh eye is a distinct asset.
I suppose it is a little hard to hide your biases, though. It shows through the cracks, you can’t help it. If somebody thinks that my bias is toward what’s known as the environmental movement, they’re right. But as a writer I’m struggling to present both sides. There’s the section in Coming into the Country where Ed Gelvin and his son Stanley have run this Caterpillar bulldozer up into the mountains. They’ve dragged it over incredibly rugged terrain, a place without any roads, all fifty-five tons. They’ve taken it apart and put it back together, and they’ve gotten it to work. This is a family that has invested everything trying to get gold, and they’re tearing up a beautiful stream. The passage says, “Am I disgusted? Manifestly not. Not from here, from now, from this perspective. I am too warmly, too subjectively caught up in what the Gelvins are doing. In the ecomilitia, bust me to private.”
I’m for these guys. In this time and this place—don’t hold me to this forever—I’m for these guys. But some people think I should be writing with my cudgel. They think that I don’t have the temerity to express these opinions. That’s just the exact reverse of what’s going on. I’m trying to lay this thing out for the reader. Not to take the reader and rub his nose in it, and say, This is how you should think. I want the reader to do his own thinking. And why do I do that? Because I think it’s a higher form of writing.
I remember there was one piece we were working on that had this weird pun in it. And Bingham said, You know that pun there? That’s terrible, that’s really bad. And I said, I want it to stay there. I like that. And he says, Well, you’re the writer; I just work here. And then we go on talking about other things and everything else. Twenty-four hours go by, we’re back at his desk, he says, You know that line there? Um, it’s really bad, you should think about it again. I said, Bobby, we talked about that. I like that line. And then he mentioned it a third time and I said something similar. Another day went by, and I walked into his office, first thing I say, Bob, you know that pun there? Take it out, OK? It’s no good.
Not a smile, nothing. He showed nothing on his face. He was totally aware during this entire sequence, of course. He was tremendous. And he was just a very, very, very good friend.
It may sound like I’ve got some sort of formula by which I write. Hell, no! You’re out there completely on your own—all you’ve got to do is write. OK, it’s nine in the morning. All I’ve got to do is write. But I go hours before I’m able to write a word. I make tea. I mean, I used to make tea all day long. And exercise, I do that every other day. I sharpened pencils in the old days when pencils were sharpened. I just ran pencils down. Ten, eleven, twelve, one, two, three, four—this is every day. This is damn near every day. It’s four-thirty and I’m beginning to panic. It’s like a coiling spring. I’m really unhappy. I mean, you’re going to lose the day if you keep this up long enough. Five: I start to write. Seven: I go home. That happens over and over and over again. So why don’t I work at a bank and then come in at five and start writing? Because I need those seven hours of gonging around. I’m just not that disciplined. I don’t write in the morning—I just try to write. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee)(21 jul 2011)
It sounds very mechanical, but the effect is the exact opposite. What it does is free you to write. It liberates you to write. You’ve got all the notes there; you come in in the morning and you read through what you’re going to try to write, and there’s not that much to read. You’re not worried about the other ninety-five percent, it’s off in a folder somewhere. It’s you and the keyboard. You get away from the mechanics through this mechanical means. The spontaneity comes in the writing, the phraseology, the telling of the story—after you’ve put all this stuff aside. You can read through those relevant notes in a relatively short period of time, and you know that’s what you want to be covering. But then you spend the rest of your day hoping spontaneous things will occur. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee)(21 jul 2011)
INTERVIEWER
How do you approach transitions between these various sections?
MCPHEE
You look for good juxtapositions. If you’ve got good juxtapositions, you don’t have to worry about what I regard as idiotic things, like a composed transition. If your structure really makes sense, you can make some jumps and your reader is going to go right with you. You don’t need to build all these bridges and ropes between the two parts.
I knew where I was going to start, but I didn’t know the body of the thing. I went into a seminar room here at the university, and I laid the thirty-six cards out on the table. I just looked and looked at them. After a while I was looking at two cards: Upset Rapid, which is a big-time rapid in the Colorado River, and Alpinist. In Upset Rapid, Brower doesn’t ride the rapid. Why doesn’t he ride the rapid? His answer to Floyd Dominy is, “Because I’m chicken.” That’s a pretty strong scene. What next? Well, there are more than seventy peaks in the Sierra Nevada that were first ascended by David Brower, hanging by his fingernails on some cliff. “Because I’m chicken”? This juxtaposition is just loaded with irony, and by putting the Alpinist right after Upset Rapid, in the white space between those two sections there’s a hell of a lot of stuff that I don’t have to say. It’s told by the structure. It’s all crackling along between those two things. So I put those two cards side by side. Now there are thirty-four other parts there on the table. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee)(21 jul 2011)
Once I’ve written the lead, I read the notes and then I read them again. I read them until they’re coming out my ears. Ideas occur, but what I’m doing, basically, is looking for logical ways in which to subdivide the material. I’m looking for things that fit together, things that relate. For each of these components, I create a code—it’s like an airport code. If a topic is upstate New York, I’ll write UNY or something in the margin. When I get done, the mass of notes has some tiny code beside each note. And I write each code on an index card.
INTERVIEWER
How many components go into a piece like Encounters with the Archdruid?
MCPHEE
The whole book had thirty-six components. What I ended up with was thirty-six three-by-five cards, each with a code word. Some of these things are absolutely dictated by the story of the journey down the Colorado River. But the choices are interesting where it’s not dictated, like the facts of David Brower’s life.
You write a lead. You sit down and think, Where do I want this piece to begin? What makes sense? It can’t be meretricious. It’s got to deliver on what you promise. It should shine like a flashlight down through the piece. So you write a beginning. Then you go back to your notes and start looking for an overall structure. It’s three times as easy if you’ve got that lead. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee)(21 jul 2011)
I always say to my classes that it’s analogous to cooking a dinner. You go to the store and you buy a lot of things. You bring them home and you put them on the kitchen counter, and that’s what you’re going to make your dinner out of. If you’ve got a red pepper over here—it’s not a tomato. You’ve got to deal with what you’ve got. You don’t have an ideal collection of material every time out. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee)(21 jul 2011)
First thing I do is transcribe my notes. This is not an altogether mindless process. You’re copying your notes, and you get ideas. You get ideas for structure. You get ideas for wording, phraseologies. As I’m typing, if something crosses my mind I flip it in there. When I’m done, certain ideas have accrued and have been added to it, like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
And so now you’ve got piles of stuff on the table, unlike a fiction writer. A fiction writer doesn’t have this at all. A fiction writer is feeling her way, feeling her way—it’s much more of a trial-and-error, exploratory thing. With nonfiction, you’ve got your material, and what you’re trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn’t violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes it interesting to read.
I always say to my classes that it’s analogous to cooking a dinner. You go to the store and you buy a lot of things. You bring them home and you put them on the kitchen counter, and that’s what you’re going to make your dinner out of. If you’ve got a red pepper over here—it’s not a tomato. You’ve got to deal with what you’ve got. You don’t have an ideal collection of material every time out.
I’d started with single profiles, and when I’d done enough of them, I began to want to do a double profile. Two people at once, with the idea that one plus one might equal more than two. Who would it be? A great example for a project like that would be Frank Gehry and Peter Lewis. This Peter Lewis is some character—a one-legged insurance billionaire who lives much of the year on one of the largest yachts in the world and was once caught carrying pot into New Zealand. And he donated the sixty million bucks to build the new library here on campus. And Frank Gehry is Frank Gehry. These two guys have to know each other—that library’s built here because Peter Lewis gave the money and said that Frank Gehry would be the architect. If you did a profile of Frank Gehry and a profile of Peter Lewis, and you put them in the same piece of writing, one plus one would add up to three point six.
Was it hard to come up with things to write about?
MCPHEE
I was really quite at sea about that. Let’s say I wanted to write about clams. I’d go to Shawn with that idea, and he would say, Oh no, no. That’s reserved in a general way for another writer. That’s reserved in a general way. Isn’t that amazing? Shawn never mentioned one writer to another. Shawn operated at the hub of an old-fashioned wheel, with the spokes going out all over the place, and the spokes were the writers and no one ever touched another. He kept this amazing thing going. He had thought beforehand about an amazing number of subjects, so the odds were if you brought something up, Shawn had pondered it in some context before. He always knew what he thought immediately. Sometimes he said that it was reserved for another writer, and sometimes he just wasn’t interested. If that was the case, he’d say, Oh no, that’s not for us.
At any rate, that first month, January of 1965, I go in there and we’re having this conversation—Oh no, that’s not for us. Again and again. And then finally I said, Well I have another idea. It’s a piece about oranges. That’s all I said—oranges. I didn’t mention juice, I didn’t mention trees, I didn’t mention the tropics. Just—oranges.
Oh yes! Oh yes! he says. That’s very good. The next thing I knew I was in Florida talking to orange growers.
He spoke so softly. I was awestruck: the guy’s the editor of The New Yorker and he’s this mysterious person. It was the most transforming event of my writing existence, meeting him, and you could take a hundred years to try to get to know him, and this was just the first day. But he was a really encouraging editor. Shawn always functioned as the editor of new writers, so he edited the Bradley thing. So I spent a lot of time in his office, talking commas. He explained everything with absolute patience, going through seventeen thousand words, a comma at a time, bringing in stuff from the grammarians and the readers’ proofs. He talked about each and every one of these items with the author. These were long sessions. At one point I said, Mr. Shawn, you have this whole enterprise going, a magazine is printing this weekend, and you’re the editor of it, and you sit here talking about these commas and semicolons with me—how can you possibly do it?
And he said, It takes as long as it takes. A great line, and it’s so true of writing. It takes as long as it takes.
I wrote articles during the day for the company magazine, but I couldn’t make myself write at night, so after a couple of months it became clear to me it wasn’t working out. All the time I was trying to sell stuff to The New Yorker.
INTERVIEWER
Were you always hoping to write for The New Yorker?
MCPHEE
The thing about writers is that, with very few exceptions, they grow slowly—very slowly. A John Updike comes along, he’s an anomaly. That’s no model, that’s a phenomenon. I sent stuff to The New Yorker when I was in college and then for ten years thereafter before they accepted something. I used to paper my wall with their rejection slips. And they were not making a mistake. Writers develop slowly. That’s what I want to say to you: don’t look at my career through the wrong end of a telescope. This is terribly important to me as a teacher of writers, of kids who want to write.
But writing teaches writing. And I’ll tell you this, that summer in Firestone Library, I felt myself palpably growing as a writer. You just don’t sit there and write thirty thousand words without learning something. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee)(21 jul 2011)
They asked me to show up on the first day of senior year with thirty thousand words. So I spent the summer in Firestone Library, working in the English grad-study room, writing longhand on yellow pads. I had a real good time in there, working alongside these English grad students, all in various stages of suffering. I got my thirty thousand words done, and then I finished the thing over Christmas. It had a really good structure and was technically fine. But it had no life in it at all. One person wrote a note on it that said, You demonstrated you know how to saddle a horse. Now go find the horse. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee)(21 jul 2011)
Certainly the aural part of writing is a big, big thing to me. I can’t stand a sentence until it sounds right, and I’ll go over it again and again. Once the sentence rolls along in a certain way, that’s sentence A. Sentence B may work out well, but then its effect on sentence A may spoil the rhythm of the two together. One of the long-term things about knitting a piece of writing together is making all this stuff fit.
I always read the second draft aloud, as a way of moving forward. I read primarily to my wife, Yolanda, and I also have a friend whom I read to. I read aloud so I can hear if it’s fitting together or not. It’s just as much a part of the composition as going out and buying a ream of paper.
At Princeton High School I had the same English teacher for the first three years. Her name was Olive McKee. She put a great deal of emphasis on writing. In the average week, she would have us do three compositions. We could write anything we wanted to—poetry, fiction, or a story about a real person. But what it had to have, even if it was a poem, was a diagram of some kind that showed the structure of what we had done. You had to turn that in with your piece. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee)(21 jul 2011)
In A Sense of Where You Are, McPhee describes Bradley playing basketball “according to the foundation pattern of the game.” Despite possessing an amazingly accurate shot, the athlete distinguished himself primarily through attention to footwork, passing, and strategy. In a sense, McPhee writes the same way. He rarely draws attention to himself, but his sense of structure, detail, and language is so refined that his presence is felt on every page. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee)(21 jul 2011)
“I’m obsessed with the structure of pieces of writing,” explained McPhee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Princeton’s Ferris Professor of Journalism, who has taught his legendary class on writing at the University for more than 30 years.
For his students, McPhee sketches primitive diagrams – a horizontal line with loops above and below it to represent the tangents along the storyline, a circle with lines shooting out of it that denote narrative pathways – to illustrate how a piece of writing is assembled. The “doodles,” as he calls them, are projected on a screen in front of the class.
The problem with slot machines, as Telnaes saw it, was that their jackpots were limited by the number of reels they could use. Since players expected each reel to have no more than 10 to 15 symbols, a machine needed many reels to make the odds long enough to justify a huge payout when all the cherries or bells settled into a row. But the more reels a machine had, the more players were reminded of the fact that their quest for riches would likely end in futility; no one wanted to try their luck on a machine with dozens of reels (or, alternatively, hundreds and hundreds of symbols on enormous reels).
Telnaes’ solution to this conundrum was US Patent Number 4,448,419, awarded in 1984. His invention called for slot machine results to be determined not by the spinning of reels but by a random-number generator. The reels on such a machine would display only a visual representation of the generator’s results, lining up when a winning number spit forth or (far more frequently) settling into a losing mishmash of symbols. The patent made possible the development of slot machines that could offer extremely long odds—and thus enticingly massive jackpots—while still appearing to have just a few tumblers. IGT wisely purchased Telnaes’ patent in 1989, thereby guaranteeing itself a steady stream of royalties as its competitors adopted random-number generators, too.
A psychologist at a girl’s college asked the members of his class to compliment any girl wearing red. Within a week the cafeteria was a blaze of red.(19 jul 2011)
The work I got involved in was to try to understand these scaling laws. And to make it a very short story, what was proposed apart from the thinking was, look, this is universal. It cuts across the design of organisms. Whether you are insects, fish, mammals or birds, you get the same scaling laws. It is independent of design. Therefore, it must be something that is about the structure of the way things are distributed.
You recognize what the problem is. You have ten14cells. You have this problem. You’ve got to sustain them, roughly speaking, democratically and efficiently. And however natural selection solved it, it solved it by evolving hierarchical networks.
There is a very simple way of doing it. You take something macroscopic, you go through a hierarchy and you deliver them to very microscopic sites, like for example, your capillaries to your cells and so on. And so the idea was, this is true at all scales. It is true of an ecosystem; it is true within the cell. And what these scaling laws are manifesting are the generic, universal, mathematical, topological properties of networks.
The question is, what are the principles that are governing these networks that are independent of design? After a lot of work we postulated the following, just to give an idea.
First, they have to be space filling. They have to go everywhere. They have to feed every cell, every piece of the organism.
Secondly, they have things like invariant units. That is when you evolve from a human being to a whale (to make it a simple story) you do not change the basic units. The cells of the whale or the capillaries of whale, which are the kind of fundamental units, are pretty much indistinguishable from yours and mine. There is this invariance. When you evolve to a new species, you use the same units but you change the network. That’s the idea in this picture.
And the last one is of the infinitude of networks that have these properties - space filling and invariant total units. The ones that have actually evolved by the process of continuous feedback implicit in natural selection are those that have in some way optimized the system.
For example, the amount of work that your heart has to do to pump blood around your circulatory system to keep you alive is minimized with respect to the design of the system. You can put it into mathematics. You have a network theory, you mathematize the network, and then you make variations of the network and ask what is the one that minimizes the amount of energy your heart has to use to pump blood through it.
The principle is simple. Mathematically, it is quite complicated and challenging, but you can solve all of that. And you do that so that you can maximize the amount of energy you can put into fitness to make children. You want to minimize the amount of energy just to keep you alive, so that you can make more babies. That’s the simplest big picture.
All of those results about scaling are derived. A quarter, four, emerges. And what is the four? It turns out the four isn’t a four. The four is actually a “three plus one”, meaning it’s the dimensionality of the space we live in plus one, which is actually to do, loosely speaking, with the fractal nature of these networks, the fact that there’s a sub-similar property.
In D dimensions, you read D plus one (that’s my physicist self speaking). Instead of being three quarters for metabolic rate, it would be D over D plus one.
The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. “Vámonos, amigos,” he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight.(10 jul 2011)
You should start with the Cucumber and only write the code that you need to make the tests pass it they come. Very often, this means that first you will edit routes.rb to allow a route from the page URL you want to the proper controller action. Then you’ll write an RSpec (or other unit test) for the controller action, then you’ll define the controller action, then you’ll write a unit test for the piece of business logic the controller is response for (ie: assigning an array of ActiveRecord objects to an instance variable), and so on. Eventually you’ll access a property of an ActiveRecord model that doesn’t exist, and a test will fail because that property is not defined on that object. At this point you’ll write a migration to modify your schema. ((1) Lee Edwards’s Answers on Test-Driven Development - Quora)(07 jul 2011)
We use a simple, point-based system for story estimation, where the points are measures of relative
complexity. Developers are much better at estimating the complexity of a problem than they are at
estimating the duration of work to solve that problem.
Velocity is a measure of how many points a given team completes in a given week. Experience
has shown that a given development team will work through a fairly consistent number of points
on a weekly basis, and this strong central tendency means that velocity for a team becomes very
predictable after the first two to three weeks of development. This will give you a very early
indication of how long a given set of features will take, and give you the visibility to make informed
choices about what features you choose to implement.
leadership as “the gift of getting everybody to perform at their best”(04 jul 2011)
There isn’t much frank, accurate information on abortion out there. Its only really there for people who know to read scientific literature or know where to find that information. It’s presented as a disastrous, horrible thing that’s shrouded in secrecy. It’s the most common outpatient procedure in the United States. Four in every ten women gets an abortion.(30 jun 2011)
After an animal has digested eaten material, the remains of that material are expelled from its body as waste. Though it is lower in energy than the food it came from, feces may still contain a large amount of energy, often 50% of that of the original food.[2] This means that of all food eaten, a significant amount of energy remains for the decomposers of ecosystems. (Feces - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(30 jun 2011)
does it start with good taste? (and mimesis?)(30 jun 2011)
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."(28 jun 2011)
Someday every overprivileged, misunderstood high school boy who has ever come of age in New York will have his own movie, and one good thing about “The Art of Getting By” is that it brings that day, the day we can move on to other matters, a little closer (‘The Art of Getting By’ by Gavin Wiesen - Review - NYTimes.com)(26 jun 2011)
Two images hint at its actual globe-straddling, 10x-Walmart influence: the image of the Boston Tea Partiers dumping crates of tea into the sea during the American struggle for independence, and the image of smoky opium dens in China. One image symbolizes the rise of a new empire. The other marks the decline of an old one.
The East India Company supplied both the tea and the opium.
At a broader level, the EIC managed to balance an unbalanced trade equation between Europe and Asia whose solution had eluded even the Roman empire. Massive flows of gold and silver from Europe to Asia via the Silk and Spice routes had been a given in world trade for several thousand years. Asia simply had far more to sell than it wanted to buy. Until the EIC came along
A very rough sketch of how the EIC solved the equation reveals the structure of value-addition in the mercantilist world economy.
The EIC started out by buying textiles from Bengal and tea from China in exchange for gold and silver.
Then it realized it was playing the same sucker game that had trapped and helped bankrupt Rome.
Next, it figured out that it could take control of the opium industry in Bengal, trade opium for tea in China with a significant surplus, and use the money to buy the textiles it needed in Bengal. Guns would be needed.
As a bonus, along with its partners, it participated in yet another clever trade: textiles for slaves along the coast of Africa, who could be sold in America for gold and silver.
For this scheme to work, three foreground things and one background thing had to happen: the corporation had to effectively take over Bengal (and eventually all of India), Hong Kong (and eventually, all of China, indirectly) and England. Robert Clive achieved the first goal by 1757. An employee of the EIC, William Jardine, founded what is today Jardine Matheson, the spinoff corporation most associated with Hong Kong and the historic opium trade. It was, during in its early history, what we would call today a narco-terrorist corporation; the Taliban today are kindergarteners in that game by comparison. And while the corporation never actually took control of the British Crown, it came close several times, by financing the government during its many troubles.
The background development was simpler. England had to take over the oceans and ensure the safe operations of the EIC.
But these events were set in motion over 30 years earlier, in the 1750s. There was no need for backroom subterfuge. It was all out in the open because the corporation was such a new beast, nobody really understood the dangers it represented. The EIC maintained an army. Its merchant ships often carried vastly more firepower than the naval ships of lesser nations. Its officers were not only not prevented from making money on the side, private trade was actually a perk of employment (it was exactly this perk that allowed William Jardine to start a rival business that took over the China trade in the EIC’s old age). And finally — the cherry on the sundae — there was nothing preventing its officers like Clive from simultaneously holding political appointments that legitimized conflicts of interest. If you thought it was bad enough that Dick Cheney used to work for Halliburton before he took office, imagine if he’d worked there while in office, with legitimate authority to use his government power to favor his corporate employer and make as much money on the side as he wanted, and call in the Army and Navy to enforce his will. That picture gives you an idea of the position Robert Clive found himself in, in 1757.
Mass Mass Transit – If a big city could coordinate to create subways, etc. on the scale and quality of New York, it could support densities like New York. The level of investment and coordination required to pull this off, however, seems well beyond what any known city can muster. New York only achieved it accidentally (a dotcom-like boom in private subway building). (Overcoming Bias: The Auto-Auto Race)(24 jun 2011)
smoking one’s way to health in the 17th century plague outbreak in naples bc the purported cause was a poisonous miasma. shuttering windows while indoors, etc.
these insane costumes with rods and beaks.(23 jun 2011)
is it possible that the bulk of this reading is a waste when I don't engage it — that the idea of seeding dormant associable hooks is bogus?(23 jun 2011)
"…and you did good today, I'm just saying there's a way to be a person" (Leo)(22 jun 2011)
Do not take cover behind vehicles. Pistol bullets easily pass through both doors of a car; rifle bullets can pass through a vehicle lengthwise. Stopped or disabled vehicles are "bullet magnets" that draw fire. The best protection provided by a car or truck is its ability to move away at high speed. If forced to take cover behind a vehicle or inside one, put the engine block between yourself and the shooter - it rarely gets penetrated by small arms fire.
Walls, trees, and structures provide concealment, but may not provide cover. The 7.62mm round used by the AK-47, a common assault rifle in war zones, can pass through a concrete block. The less powerful 9mm pistol round can go through a dozen layers of sheetrock. [10]
A rule of thumb to keep in mind is the 'three-second rule' which basically states if you need to move to another place of cover, it should not be more than a three second sprint away. A good phrase to remember (if possible) is: 'I'm up, He's seen me, I'm down.' Basically, you are up out of cover and moving (fast), you assume the shooter has seen you and is taking aim, and then you are back down behind suitable defensive cover before he can fire.(22 jun 2011)
The Bakaara Market (Suuqa Bakaaraha) is an open market and the largest in Somalia. Created in late 1972 during the reign of Siad Barre, its original purpose was to allow proprietors to sell daily essentials. The civil war subsequently created demand for arms and ammunition. Everything from pistols to anti-aircraft weapons are being sold. Falsified documents are also readily available. Forged Somali, Ethiopian and Kenyan passports can be processed within minutes.
I’m reading a short book by Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy, on the nature of evil, arguing that many of the terrible things that people do to each other are a consequence of a failure of empathy. The word ‘evil’ is unhelpful. It stops us thinking too closely
The jihadi preference for instant rage, slaughter and martyrdom repels everyone, including nearly all Muslims. And the list of radical Islamist dislikes is too long, too much against the grain of human aspiration for their cause to have much appeal in the long run – sexuality, free thought, music, gays, evolutionary biology, unveiled independent women, pluralism, democracy, curiosity, fun, tolerance, fashion, humour…
I saw a demonstration along the Euston Road in London the other day – about a hundred chanting fellows in beards, with the women well to the rear, as you’d expect, head to toe in burqas, and many carrying banners demanding ‘Sharia law now’. The rush-hour traffic was edging round them; no one was paying much attention. They were a minor nuisance, like a failed traffic light. They didn’t look threatening so much as comically hopeless. How marvellous: no one was shouting or throwing stones at them, no one was much bothered. They were exercising their well-protected (I hope) right to demonstrate. A right they would surely never grant to others, if they had their way. They seemed not only puny but politically illiterate – some of their banners said ‘Hands off Gaddafi’. Well, he’s been a scourge to Islamists in his own country, so how on earth they thought he was someone they would want to support, I don’t know.
Always distrust utopian thinkers. People who believe they can deliver us to happiness for ever are bound to think, rationally enough, that the means will justify the ends. If it will bring the peaceable kingdom to pass, then break the eggs to make that everlasting omelette!
This celebrated book has been in print for over half a century. It’s a historical account of the fanatical millenarian sects that swept across Europe from the 11th to 15th centuries: sects that were driven by certainty of the world coming to an end. Clearly, it has relevance for our times. And when the world ended there would be deliverance for the elect. Your enemies would be damned just as you would be saved. These sects were extremely violent, and they came from the poorest, most deprived, marginal sections of society. They surged across Northern Germany, killing Jews, priests, the bourgeois.
Frank Kermode, in his famous book The Sense of an Ending, elaborated on Cohn’s masterwork by suggesting that actually it’s very common for all of us – especially artists – to feel that we live at the end of times, and that our own demise means all the more to us because we’re not simply dying in the middle of the plot, in medias res. Our lives take on significance because as we decline we notice our society is declining all around us. It’s part of a yearning for narrative significance. As Kermode said, no one can hear a clock saying, as it does, tick tick. What we hear is tick tock. A beginning and an end. We impose this order.
He was impenetrably courteous. At first, quite difficult to get beyond his very gentlemanly, polite and considerate shell. He protected himself. Behind this shell was all of his work. It was easier to get a more intimate Updike by writing letters. If I wrote, I’d get a response by return of post, apologising for being so quick, just as I would be apologising for my delayed replies. He said it was the only way he could keep his desk clear. But of course it was not that at all. This was a highly organised mind with boundless creative energy. He could turn in 1200 words of fiction in a day, write a review or an essay, and still address
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,(22 jun 2011)
I have a careless theory that the poetry of Larkin has had a profound effect on the prose writing of my generation. There are many writers of my age who are steeped in Larkin and, like me, incorporate the cadences of his lines, often without being aware of it. His poems are part of my mental furniture. Yesterday I slipped outside to get a sandwich at lunchtime, the sun was out, I looked at some rowan trees across the street, and I thought – ah yes! – ‘The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said’. That’s Larkin’s poem ‘The Trees’. It has some almost Shakespearian lines: ‘Yet still the unresting castles thresh / In fullgrown thickness every May’.
On that note, I want to ask about style. I would describe Larkin’s style as conversational, but also with extreme precision and clarity of reflection, and he engages very directly with everyday experience. Prose and poetry aside, do you model your style on his at all?
Well Larkin’s style is deceptively conversational; narratively, it’s extremely and artfully compressed. Perhaps that’s why prose writers admire him so much. T S Eliot said that aesthetic revolutions in poetry are about the return to the rhythms of everyday speech, and Larkin fulfils those terms with clarity and restrained dark humour.
How does this affect my prose? There’s something in those cadences. There are times when I look back over some piece of work and I think, ‘I know where that rhythm comes from – it’s something out of “The Whitsun Weddings”, or out of “Self’s the Man”.’ It can be something so small, like a sentence that seems to miss its final beat in order to deliver something a little flat. There’s one other element too – a kind of morose scepticism, Larkin’s reluctance to be moved. And when he is moved, as he famously is in ‘High Windows’, the effect is all the more powerful.
Martin Amis and I used to meet up before going out in the evenings in the 70s, and spend an hour downing a bottle of wine and reading aloud and celebrating Larkin. I’m sure Martin would also acknowledge the curious power of Larkin in his work.
I’m sometimes asked by a literary intellectual in an on-stage discussion – often through the medium of a puzzled frown – why I’m interested in science. As if I was being asked why I had a particular fascination for designs of differential gears in old Volkswagens, or car-parking regulations in Chicago in the 1940s. Science is simply organised human curiosity and we should all take part. It’s a matter of beauty. Just as we treasure beauty in our music and literature, so there’s beauty to be found in the exuberant invention of science.
Sometimes I experimentally write out a first paragraph – or middle paragraph, even – of a novel which I feel no obligation to write. Those kind of dabblings I always set down in a green, ring-bound A4 notebook. It’s full of paragraphs from novels I will never complete, or hardly start. But sooner or later, one of those paragraphs will snag my attention, and I’ll come back to it asking: why does that interest me so much, why does that seem to offer a peculiar kind of mental freedom? And so I might find myself adding a page or two. It was with a complete free hand, for example, that I once wrote what turned out to be the opening of Atonement – with no clear sense that I was committed to anything at all, I was just playing with narrative positions, with tone of voice, with a certain descriptive moment. Or I might decide that what I’ve written belongs to the middle of a novel, and then I’ll spend some idle time tracing out a beginning. Then abandoning it. It’s a way of tricking myself into writing novels.
I tend to leave long gaps between novels; I’m quite happy not to write for months on end. I don’t have anxieties about writer’s block either – I don’t even believe in the concept – but I’m a great believer in hesitation. I think there’s nothing wrong with pausing when you’re not sure how to proceed. And in that rather dreamy, floating kind of mental state (one which I long for once I’ve started a book and can no longer have it) I go where my reading and thoughts and travels take me.
a baby-faced man of preposterous proportions(22 jun 2011)
The Book of Disquiet. This is a book of ideas. It’s not a book about the internet. It was written much earlier, in the 20th century, and written in Portuguese. It’s really a book of meditations. It’s very philosophical. It applies to the internet in that the main point is how much joy you can take in small things and small changes and the true drama of life can be extraordinarily minute in scale, and this, I think, gets at the idea that the internet and the stories we follow are, to a lot of us, extremely important and exciting and meaningful, though really they are just a few changes of characters on a little screen somewhere.
“One of the New York Times’ roles in this new world is authority—and that’s probably the rarest commodity on the web,” explains Pilhofer as the waiter gives us our check. “That’s why in some respects we’re gung-ho and in other respects very conservative. Everything we do has to be to New York Times standards. Everything. And people are crazy about that. And that’s a good thing.”
In journalism, a nut graph is a paragraph, particularly in a feature story, that explains the news value of the story.(22 jun 2011)
In 1928 the Paris Herald Tribune became the first newspaper distributed by airplane, flying copies to London from Paris in time for breakfast(22 jun 2011)
An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion
In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God’s power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down.
The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.
Hindus and Sikhs believe that human civilization degenerates spiritually during the Kali Yuga,[4][5] which is referred to as the Dark Age because in it people are as far removed as possible from God. Hinduism often symbolically represents morality (dharma) as a bull. In Satya Yuga, the first stage of development, the bull has four legs, but in each age morality is reduced by one quarter. By the age of Kali, morality is reduced to only a quarter of that of the golden age, so that the bull of Dharma has only one leg.[6][7]
Kali Yuga is associated with the apocalypticdemonKali, not to be confused with the goddess Kālī (read as Kaalee) (these are unrelated words in the Sanskrit language). The “Kali” of Kali Yuga means “strife, discord, quarrel, or contention.”
We don’t have to look far for evidence. Two million patients pick up infections in American hospitals, most because someone didn’t follow basic antiseptic precautions. Forty per cent of coronary-disease patients and sixty per cent of asthma patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care. And half of major surgical complications are avoidable with existing knowledge. It’s like no one’s in charge—because no one is. The public’s experience is that we have amazing clinicians and technologies but little consistent sense that they come together to provide an actual system of care, from start to finish, for people. We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need.
The core structure of medicine—how health care is organized and practiced—emerged in an era when doctors could hold all the key information patients needed in their heads and manage everything required themselves. One needed only an ethic of hard work, a prescription pad, a secretary, and a hospital willing to serve as one’s workshop, loaning a bed and nurses for a patient’s convalescence, maybe an operating room with a few basic tools. We were craftsmen. We could set the fracture, spin the blood, plate the cultures, administer the antiserum. The nature of the knowledge lent itself to prizing autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency among our highest values, and to designing medicine accordingly. But you can’t hold all the information in your head any longer, and you can’t master all the skills. No one person can work up a patient’s back pain, run the immunoassay, do the physical therapy, protocol the MRI, and direct the treatment of the unexpected cancer found growing in the spine. I don’t even know what it means to “protocol” the MRI.
Before Elias Zerhouni became director of the National Institutes of Health, he was a senior hospital leader at Johns Hopkins, and he calculated how many clinical staff were involved in the care of their typical hospital patient—how many doctors, nurses, and so on. In 1970, he found, it was 2.5 full-time equivalents. By the end of the nineteen-nineties, it was more than fifteen. The number must be even larger today. Everyone has just a piece of patient care. We’re all specialists now—even primary-care doctors. A structure that prioritizes the independence of all those specialists will have enormous difficulty achieving great care.
Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good
job, but if you want to make about the same money and be happier, you could
actually just go run a fast food joint. You are much better off using code as
your secret weapon in another profession.
People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and
get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government,
sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing
things to advance those disciplines.
FOOTNOTE The convention that headlines are written by copy-editors and not by reporters or columnists goes back to the days of print, when headlines had to be custom-crafted to occupy the right amount of space: a quantity that couldn’t be known until the page was laid out. For a piece in electronic form, there’s no reason not to let the author create the heading. It’s called “cultural lag.”(16 jun 2011)
From his Notebooks, (the best Emerson to read, in my view) circa 1841:
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over & actually read a volume of 4 or 500 pages. Even the great books. “Come,” say they, “we will give you the key to the world” — Each poet each philosopher says this, & we expect to go like a thunderbolt to the centre, but the thunder is a superficial phenomenon, makes a skin-deep cut, and so does the Sage — whether Confucius, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates; striking at right angles to the globe his force is instantly diffused laterally & enters not. The wedge turns out to be a rocket. I have found this to be the case with every book I have read & yet I take up a new writer with a sort of pulse beat of expectation.
The strict Keynesian answer is: it should not matter. Demand is demand. As Keynes himself said in one of his more cynical moments, it would suffice if the government put bank notes in bottles and buried them in coal mines, anything to encourage private investors to put people to work.(16 jun 2011)
“deserters must be executed. any general will tell you that.”(15 jun 2011)
e·mic
Adjective/ˈēmik/
Relating to or denoting an approach to the study or description of a particular language or culture in terms of its internal elements and their functioning rather than in terms of any existing external scheme
guides for youngsters are tendentious and therefore controversial because they must be simple and are therefore astringent. it’s an especially clear kind of lossy compression.(13 jun 2011)
the sort of stuff that goes into high school yearbooks(13 jun 2011)
And here’s where I save your life. Because the truth about hyperpartisanship is that it is an absolutely miserable and unpleasant way to be a sports fan. No one talks about this, because (a) people who complain about rage in sports tend to want to mourn some lost standard of politeness, which has nothing to do with anything, and (b) because hyperpartisan fans are the most outwardly invested in their clubs, so there’s a presumption that they’re the most authentic or admirable supporters, even if they’re also, everyone knows, unbearably obnoxious. It’s the last bit, the presumption of authenticity, that’s the most concerning, because if you’re just getting into soccer, and you love your club, well, then you don’t want anyone to be more totally into your club than you are. So especially if you’re already surrounded by a lot of hyperpartisan fans in your daily life, your instinct may be to go in with blinders on and drink from the chalice of the faith.
The problem is that by doing so, you condemn yourself to a life of always being at least a little angry about a thing you supposedly love, a life of storing up slights and spinning them into bitter little stories, a life of basically hostile, suspicious, and un-fun commitment to a thing that only exists to give you joy. The sole and entire point of sports is to enjoy sports; even if you think athletic competition has a deeper purpose, that it helps with moral instruction or enforcing community ties or whatever else, it’s only able to serve that purpose because it’s fun in the first place. If your love of soccer has brought you to a point where you’re no longer really able to see the game as something wonderful and amazing except in narrow moments of unequivocal triumph, then you are doing it wrong, no matter how many kills you rack up on the internet. On that note, it’s also not unimportant that the mind-warp of hyperpartisanship is eventually going to make you think and say things that are, let’s be frank, really fucking stupid, and that there’s no need for you to be really fucking stupid just to support your club. Last week I heard from two separate Madrid fans who tortured themselves through an argument that Barcelona are actually the most negative team in soccer, and especially when they play Madrid. Anything is beautiful if you say it is, but like Mourinho’s postgame spy novel, that was a pretty big stretch.
That, in fact, is exactly the theory behind the Sex Purchase Law in Sweden. As of 1999, johns are punished by up to six months’ imprisonment, traffickers are locked up for 2-to-10-year hits, and prostitutes are offered medical care, education, and housing. As a result, prostitution has been reduced by 50 percent in Sweden, and the purchase of sex, which is understood to be a human-rights abuse, has decreased by 75 percent.
mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE)(11 jun 2011)
the feedback loop of praise that makes careers(11 jun 2011)
parv turns on the microscope and marvels at the giant little things(11 jun 2011)
Of course, you can use that as a baseline for talking about actual individual cities, how they over and underperform relative to this idealized scaling number. But the question is, where in the hell does that come from? What is it that’s universal that transcends countries and cultures?
Well obviously, it’s what cities are really about, not these buildings and the roads and things, but the people. It’s people. What we believe is that the scaling laws are a manifestation of social networks, of the universality of the way human beings interact, what we’re doing now, talking to one another, exchanging ideas, and doing tasks together, and so on.
It is the nature of those networks and the clustering — very importantly, the hierarchical clustering of those networks, the family structure, the way families interact, and then all the way out through businesses and so on, that there’s a kind of universality to that that is representative of the kind of scale at which humans interact.
However, some bad and ugly come with it. And the bad and ugly are things like a systematic increase in crime and various diseases, like AIDS, flu and so on. Interestingly enough, it scales all to the same 15 percent, if you double the size. Or put slightly differently, another way of saying it is, if you have a city of a million people and you broke it down into ten cities of a hundred thousand, you would require for that ten cities of a hundred thousand, 30 to 40 percent more roads, and 30 to 40 percent general infrastructure. And you would get a systematic decrease in wages and productivity and invention. Amazing. But you’d also get a decrease in crime, pollution and disease, systematically. So there are these trade-offs.
The first result that we actually got was with my German colleagues, Dirk Helbing, and his then student, Christian Kuhnert, who then worked with me. One of the first results was a very simple one —the number of gas stations as a function of city size in European cities.
What was discovered was that they behaved sort of like biology. You found that they are scaled beautifully, and it scaled as a power law, and the power law was less than one, indicating an economy of scale. Not surprisingly, the bigger the city, the less gas stations you need per capital. There is an economy of scale.
But it’s scaled! That is, it was systematic! You tell me the size of a city and I’ll tell you how many gas stations it has — that kind of idea. And not only that, it’s scaled at exactly the same way across all European cities. Kind of interesting!
But then, we discovered two things later that were quite remarkable. First, every infrastructural quantity you looked at from total length of roadways to the length of electrical lines to the length of gas lines, all the kinds of infrastructural things that are networked throughout a city, scaled in the same way as the number of gas stations. Namely, systematically, as you increase city size, I can tell you, roughly speaking, how many gas stations there are, what is the total length of roads, electrical lines, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s the same scaling in Europe, the United States, Japan and so on.
It is quite similar to biology. The exponent, instead of being three quarters was more like .85. So it’s a different exponent, but similar. But it’s an economy of scale.
The truly remarkable result was when we looked at quantities that I will call “socioeconomic”. That is, quantities that have no analog in biology. These are quantities, phenomena that did not exist until about 10,000 years ago when men and women started talking to one another and working together and forming serious communities leading to what we now call cities, i.e. things like wages, the number of educational institutions, the number of patents produced, et cetera. Things that have no analog in biology, things we invented.
And if you ask, first of all, do they scale? The answer is yes, in a regular way. Then, how do they scale? And this was the surprise to me; I’m embarrassed to say. It should have been obvious prior, but they scaled in what we called a super linear fashion. Instead of being an exponent less than one, indicating economies of scale, the exponent was bigger than one, indicating what economists call increasing returns to scale.
What does that say? That says that systematically, the bigger the city, the more wages you can expect, the more educational institutions in principle, more cultural events, more patents are produced, it’s more innovative and so on. Remarkably, all to the same degree. There was a universal exponent which turned out to be approximately 1.15 which translated to English says something like the following: If you double the size of a city from 50,000 to a hundred thousand, a million to two million, five million to ten million, it doesn’t matter what, systematically, you get a roughly 15 percent increase in productivity, patents, the number of research institutions, wages and so on, and you get systematically a 15 percent saving in length of roads and general infrastructure.
Another remarkable fact is that the planet has urbanizing at an exponential rate. Namely, 200 years ago, here sitting in Manhattan, almost everything around me would be a field. There would be a teeny settlement down at Wall Street somewhere of a small number of people. But most of the people would be living in these fields all the way up Manhattan into upstate New York. Indeed, at that time, less than four percent of the United States was urban. Primarily, it was agricultural. And now, only 200 years later, it’s almost the reverse. More like 82 percent is urban and less than 20 percent is agricultural. This has happened at an extraordinarily fast rate — and in fact, faster than exponential.
What did we learn from scaling in biology? We not only learned the network theory, but we learned that despite the fact that the whale lives in the ocean, the giraffe has a long neck, and the elephant a truck, and we walk on two feet and the mouse scurries around, at some 85, 90 percent level, we’re all scaled versions of one another.
There’s kind of one mammal, and every other mammal, no matter what size it is and where it existed, is actually some well-defined mathematically scaled version of that one master mammal, so to speak. And that is kind of amazing.
In other words, the size of a mammal, or any organism for that matter, can tell you how long it should live, how many children it should have, how oxygen diffuses across its lungs, what is the length of the ninth branch of its circulatory system, how its blood is flowing, how quickly it will grow, et cetera.
All of those results about scaling are derived. A quarter, four, emerges. And what is the four? It turns out the four isn’t a four. The four is actually a “three plus one”, meaning it’s the dimensionality of the space we live in plus one, which is actually to do, loosely speaking, with the fractal nature of these networks, the fact that there’s a sub-similar property.
The question is, what are the principles that are governing these networks that are independent of design? After a lot of work we postulated the following, just to give an idea.
First, they have to be space filling. They have to go everywhere. They have to feed every cell, every piece of the organism.
Secondly, they have things like invariant units. That is when you evolve from a human being to a whale (to make it a simple story) you do not change the basic units. The cells of the whale or the capillaries of whale, which are the kind of fundamental units, are pretty much indistinguishable from yours and mine. There is this invariance. When you evolve to a new species, you use the same units but you change the network. That’s the idea in this picture.
And the last one is of the infinitude of networks that have these properties - space filling and invariant total units. The ones that have actually evolved by the process of continuous feedback implicit in natural selection are those that have in some way optimized the system.
For example, the amount of work that your heart has to do to pump blood around your circulatory system to keep you alive is minimized with respect to the design of the system. You can put it into mathematics. You have a network theory, you mathematize the network, and then you make variations of the network and ask what is the one that minimizes the amount of energy your heart has to use to pump blood through it.
Just to give you an example, if you increase the size of an organism by a factor of ten to the fourth, four is the magnitude, you would have expected naively to have ten to the fourth times as much energy. You would have the ten to the fourth times more cells. Ten thousand times more cells. Not true. You only need a thousand times. There’s an extraordinary savings in the energy use, and that cuts across all resources as well.
When we come to social organizations, there’s an interesting question. Do we have economies of scale or what? How do cities work, for example? How do companies work in this framework? That’s one thing.
The second thing is, (again, comes from the data and the conceptual framework explains it) the bigger you are, the slower everything is. The bigger you are, you live longer. Oxygen diffuses slower across your various membranes. You take longer to mature, you grow slower, but all in a systematic, mathematizable, predictable way. The pace of life systematically slows down following these quarter power scales. And again, we’ll ask those questions about life … social life and economies.
The work I got involved in was to try to understand these scaling laws. And to make it a very short story, what was proposed apart from the thinking was, look, this is universal. It cuts across the design of organisms. Whether you are insects, fish, mammals or birds, you get the same scaling laws. It is independent of design. Therefore, it must be something that is about the structure of the way things are distributed.
You recognize what the problem is. You have ten14cells. You have this problem. You’ve got to sustain them, roughly speaking, democratically and efficiently. And however natural selection solved it, it solved it by evolving hierarchical networks.
There is a very simple way of doing it. You take something macroscopic, you go through a hierarchy and you deliver them to very microscopic sites, like for example, your capillaries to your cells and so on. And so the idea was, this is true at all scales. It is true of an ecosystem; it is true within the cell. And what these scaling laws are manifesting are the generic, universal, mathematical, topological properties of networks.
The remarkable thing in biology that got me excited and has led to all of my present work (which has now gone beyond biology and into social organizations, cities, and companies) is that there was data, quite old and fundamental to all biological processes, about metabolism: Here is maybe the most complex physical chemical process possibly in the universe, and when you ask how it is scaled with size across mammals (as an example to keep it simple) you find that there is an extraordinary regularity.
This is surprising because we believe in natural selection, and natural selection has built into it this idea that history plays an important role. There’s the environmental niche for every organism, every component of an organism, every cell type is unique and has its own unique history. So if you plotted, for example the metabolic rate on the Y axis and size on the X axis, because of the extraordinary diversity and complexity of the system and the historical contingency, you would expect points all over the map representing, of course, history and geography and so on.
Well, you find quite the contrary. You find a very simple curve, and that curve has a very simple mathematical formula. It comes out to be a very simple power law. In fact, the power law not only is simple in itself mathematically, but here it has an exponent that is extraordinarily simple. The exponent was very close to the number three quarters.
First of all, that was amazing in itself, that you see scaling. But more importantly was that the scaling is manifested across all of life into eco-systems and down within cells. So this scaling law is truly remarkable. It goes from intracellular up to ecosystems almost 30 orders of magnitude. They’re the same phenomenon.
Furthermore, if you look at any physiological variable, such as the rate at which oxygen diffuses across lungs, the length of the aorta, anything to do with the physiology of any organism, or if you look at any life history event like how long you live, how long does the organism live, how long does it take to mature, what is its growth rate, etc., and you ask how does it scale? It scales in very similar way.
That is, it scales as a simple power law. The extraordinary thing about it is that the power law has an exponent, which is always a simple multiple of one quarter. What you determine just from the data is that there’s this extraordinary simple number, four, which seems to dominate all biology and across all taxonomic groups from the microscopic to the macroscopic.
Hathcock recollects learning the trade in the 1950s and 1960s, first on a dummy keyboard before he could “contend with the added complications of the matrices and molten metal.” He began work in Oklahoma, earning $65 a week (“I haven’t had so much buying power since”). Linotype had its own magic due to the ease and flexibility of the trade. Take note, for instance, of the people Hathcock called “the travelers”:
I became aware of “travelers” — men who moved across the country from print shop to print shop. They spoke nonchalantly about every good-sized town in the country, and they always delivered their judgments in terms of the bars, women, and hotels, as well as the print shops and newspapers. Men who have traveled that much (and most travelers were men) have a sophistication that transcends formal education, an ease in any surroundings, and a brash confidence in their skills…. They had more nicknames than the Mafia — Two Star, Dirty Shirt, the Silver Fox, Speedy, Ten High, the Wandering Jew, Pete the Tramp…. One of my friends, a Scotsman, has set type everywhere in the world that English is spoken.
how I've bungled "captive audience" for years(09 jun 2011)
For example, it is sometimes remarked how marvelous it is that a biological system like language should be so discrete and clean, but in fact there is abundant gradedness and variability in the original data; the evidence for the discreteness and cleanness of language seems to be mostly evidence we ourselves have planted.(09 jun 2011)
Soon, Tufte’s notes on information design had grown into a book-length manuscript. He showed it around to publishers, who insisted on redesigning many pages in the book, and imagined it as a niche title, only worth printing a couple thousand copies. Frustrated, Tufte took out a second mortgage on his home at 18 percent interest to print the book himself. He spent most of the next summer with a book designer named Howard Gralla. The two of them sat side by side in Gralla’s apartment, eating bagels and rearranging text so words and images would be woven together on the page. “Self-publishing,” Tufte told me, “allowed for an incredible, bizarre fussiness.”
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information came out in April 1983. To save costs, Tufte told the printer to bind only half of the initial print run of 5,000 copies. The book is now in its twentieth printing, and is one of the most successful self-published books of all time.
As Hammes explains it, the reliance on PowerPoint often means that battle orders are rendered in incomplete, often unclear sentences and maps are squashed and stripped of meaningful detail, leaving essential battlefield questions of geography dangerously unclear. The details are classified, but Hammes told me that he has seen war plans for the Korean peninsula prepared in PowerPoint in which massive terrain issues were completely glossed over. On the whole, Hammes told me, the rise of PowerPoint in the military has made the decision-making process less intellectually active.
Tufte dissected NASA’s PowerPoint slides on his Web site, showing that the program didn’t allow engineers to write in scientific notation and replaced complex quantitative measurement with imprecise words like “significant.” He then published a twenty-eight-page essay called “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,” in which he analyzed hundreds of existing PowerPoint slides and showed that the statistical graphics used in PowerPoint presentations show an average of twelve numbers each, which, in Tufte’s analysis, ranks it below every major world publication except for Pravda. The low information density of PowerPoint is “approaching dementia,” he wrote.
The truth is that many of the most capable low- and middle-income students attend community colleges or less selective four-year colleges close to their home. Doing so makes them less likely to graduate from college at all, research has shown. Incredibly, only 44 percent of low-income high school seniors with high standardized test scores enroll in a four-year college, according to a Century Foundation report — compared with about 50 percent of high-income seniors who have average test scores.
“The extent of wasted human capital,” wrote the report’s authors, Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, “is phenomenal.”
Essayist? Yes…he is the one that coined the word, from French “essai,” meaning test, try, attempt, etc. Philosopher? He was an excellent observer of himself and his surroundings, from the very simple to the absurdly complex, and wrote what we know as the “Essays,” his life’s work.
In the context of our Total Noise, a piece like Mark Danner’s “Iraq: … Imagination” exemplifies a special subgenre I’ve come to think of as the service essay, with “service” here referring to both professionalism and virtue. In what is loosely framed as a group book review, Danner has processed and arranged an immense quantity of fact, opinion, confirmation, testimony, and on-site experience in order to offer an explanation of the Iraq debacle that is clear without being simplistic, comprehensive without being overwhelming, and critical without being shrill… .
I subsequently became hyper-vigilant about tracking down Wallace’s nonfiction. I remember when his essay on usage came out in Harper’s, and I read it at my desk at work, enraptured, for 90 minutes, refusing phone calls or filing requests. (I worked in a media relations office, and I was located in the middle of its large central room. My only job was to answer the phone and file.) I remember how Harper’s printed it as a lengthy excerpt in the middle of the issue, differently papered. It was one of those visceral, Proustianly perfect reading experiences. I did the same procedure a few years later when his essay “Host” came out in the Atlantic Monthly. I read it at my job in a television newsroom. Reading the magazine and ignoring the journalistic mayhem surrounding me neatly captured the strange value I found in Wallace’s nonfiction. The way it took a roiling contemporary phenomenon—in the case of “Host,” the heady mixture of intimacy and rage present in talk radio—and made it humanely funny, complexly clarified, rigorously observed. The mode he employed was dense but elastic, overburdened with the world’s details but still somehow exuberant. I stalked his byline like a jilted lover.
Kant has an almost opposite metaphor. He imagines a dove resentful about air resistance; it could fly better, surely, if the air would just get out of the way.(08 jun 2011)
A philosopher is like a fly buzzing around in a fly bottle, according to Wittgenstein. A theory of the bottle, it doesn't need. What it needs is to be shown the way out.(08 jun 2011)
Philosophy's distinguishing value? For me, it resides not so much in the big questions' multifarious answers themselves, nor, alas, in wisdom attained through the exacting process of answering them, but rather in how it invariably reminds us how little we really do know. Philosophy is, or should be, humbling — and is, for this, ennobling.(08 jun 2011)
Desistance mandates under probation grossly outperform any existing drug treatment regimen: in Hawaii, 80% of a group of long-term methamphetamine users was on the street and not using after a year on HOPE; compared to randomly selected controls, their rates of arrest for new crimes and of incarceration were reduced by more than 50%. That falsifies the claim that “trying to manage this complex condition through punishment is ineffective.”(08 jun 2011)
But just a few years ago, the situation was completely different. Although texting was popular in Europe and Japan, the rate of use in the U.S. was roughly two orders of magnitude lower — and was mainly confined to online trading addicts getting stock price alerts, sports fanatics getting score updates, etc. See “No text please, we’re American”, The Economist, 4/3/2003; “Why text messaging is not popular in the US”, textually.org, 4/4/2003. I also noted this difference in a few posts three years ago (“Texting”, 3/8/2004; “More on meiru”, 3/9/2004; “Texting, typing, speaking”, 7/1/2004).
The explanations offered for the geographic difference, back then, included Japanese commuting habits and social conventions discouraging phone conversations in public; greater availability of networked computers to Americans; different voice, SMS and internet pricing structures between Europe and the U.S.; the fact that SMS “was originally defined as part of the GSM series of standards”, while U.S. cell phone service is more diverse in terms of its underlying technology.
Some judges are believed to be unhappy with the changes too but so far none has put their head above the parapet(08 jun 2011)
although given a $75tn present-value unfunded liability and extremely strong resistance to significant tax increases, it’s a bit hard to see how Medicare’s not going to be walked back some.(07 jun 2011)
pregnant with connotations, of beautiful complex etymology(07 jun 2011)
If I ever married the very fact that the woman was my wife would be sufficient to convince me that she was superior to all other women.(07 jun 2011)
I believe in marriage, and have whooped it up for years. It is the best solution, not only of the sex question, but also of the living question. I mean for the normal man. My own life has been too irregular for it: I have been to much engrossed in other things. But any plausible gal who really made up her mind to it could probably fetch me, even today. If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself. I’ll regret it bitterly for about a month, and then settle down contentedly.
a sort of sad, wistful fury at all the things of life not recognized in its cosmogony(07 jun 2011)
June Tangney of George Mason University emphasized that humility is not equivalent to low self-esteem. Rather, the humble person has an accurate view of herself. She can acknowledge her mistakes. She has low self-focus. She is aware of her place in the grand scheme of things and is sensitive to larger and possibly higher forces.
The humble person has the ability to be “unselved.”
Humility is not modesty either, Tangney argues. The modest person has a moderate view of himself, but may still think about himself all the time. Humility is better seen as the opposite of narcissism. The narcissist has a damaged sense of self and is consequently self-centered a great deal of the time, reacting in defensive ways to ego threat. The humble person has an accurate and durable sense of self and can see the relationship between the self and the larger world.
an assemblage of vignettes, allusions and tracts, by turns provocative, grating, gorgeous and tiresome.(07 jun 2011)
The Hinkfuss Pail problem, briefly stated, says that given any functional profile and any sufficiently complex physical system, some gerrymandered set of structures within the complex system will satisfy the functional profile. The argument gets its name by imagining all the molecules in a pail of water to be the complex system. This poses a problem because it doesn’t seem that we want to say that, for example, a pail of water can “believe that X.”(07 jun 2011)
A more fitting definition of type would incorporate this ambiguity in some way, say by defining types(07 jun 2011)
Making good decisions about new data that surfaces in a rhetorical hurricane — like the data about cellphones and other technology — requires sharp critical skills. Like reading a hard poem or novel, “reading” data and commentary requires a free mind, a measure of originality and decent aesthetic judgment. Last month, John Horgan published an elegant post on Scientific American’s Web site raising questions about the efficacy of a high-fat diet in promoting weight loss. Instead of pulling magic new facts out of his data hat, in the set-piece legerdemain made famous in TED Talks and bestsellers about the brain, Mr. Horgan simply stared hard at the high-fat diet, as if at a cultural object — a poem or sofa. And then he let himself, in a brazen departure from scientific method, retch. (Cellphone Fears, Twitter Tears - NYTimes.com)(06 jun 2011)
Betteridge’s Law of Headlines states that “any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’ “.(06 jun 2011)
That said, the success of the D-Day invasion was the death knell for the Nazi empire as they’d now begun losing ground on two fronts. The naval technology that made it all possible (the distinctive Higgins Boat that unloaded tens of troops at a time on the shores of Normandy) was designed by Andrew Jackson of New Orleans, who used them to navigate the shallow waters and swamps of the area.(06 jun 2011)
Now I come to the fourth point, which is ambiguity. This, I take it, is where statistics really come into their own. Symbolic language processing is highly nondeterministic and often delivers large numbers of alternative results because it has no means of resolving the ambiguities that characterize ordinary language. This is for the clear and obvious reason that the resolution of ambiguities is not a linguistic matter. After a responsible job has been done of linguistic analysis, what remain are questions about the world. They are questions of what would be a reasonable thing to say under the given circumstances, what it would be reasonable to believe, suspect, fear or desire in the given situation. If these questions are in the purview of any academic discipline, it is presumably artificial intelligence. But artificial intelligence has a lot on its plate and to attempt to fill the void that it leaves open, in whatever way comes to hand, is entirely reasonable and proper. But it is important to understand what we are doing when we do this and to calibrate our expectations accordingly. What we are doing is to allow statistics over words that occur very close to one another in a string to stand in for the world construed widely, so as to include myths, and beliefs, and cultures, and truths and lies and so forth. As a stop-gap for the time being, this may be as good as we can do, but we should clearly have only the most limited expectations of it because, for the purpose it is intended to serve, it is clearly pathetically inadequate. The statistics are standing in for a vast number of things for which we have no computer model. They are therefore what I call an “ignorance model”.
Re stories: how about if we call them “case-based, experientially-rooted sequentially-organized semantic structures”? Would that make the idea that the mind is rooted in narrative seem less pretty and more true? As someone who has pushed this idea forward a bit, I view it as another attempt to navigate past the sandtrap of logicism. Logic views the mind as made of facts, narrative theory views it as made up of stories we continually tell ourselves. The latter does sound pretty, but it also sounds more convincing and realistic, at least to some of us. For more on this viewpoint, Google “narrative intelligence” or look at the work of case-based reasoning from Roger Schank and students.
… speculated that the magic ingredient that makes humans unique is our ability to create and understand stories using the faculties that support language: “Once you have stories, you have the kind of creativity that makes the species different to any other.”
Again, I’d like to learn more about his take on this idea. My own immediate reaction, uninformed by any knowledge of what Winston really meant, is to quote Jake at the end of The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”(06 jun 2011)
Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself. (It’s Not About You - NYTimes.com)(05 jun 2011)
Over the past few weeks, America’s colleges have sent another class of graduates off into the world. These graduates possess something of inestimable value. Nearly every sensible middle-aged person would give away all their money to be able to go back to age 22 and begin adulthood anew.
But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.
More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.
Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.
No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America. College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own.
Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.
But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front.
College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.
Today’s graduates are also told to find their passion and then pursue their dreams. The implication is that they should find themselves first and then go off and live their quest. But, of course, very few people at age 22 or 24 can take an inward journey and come out having discovered a developed self.
Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life.
What Spinoza tries to do is to define words and concepts in a very limited and rigorous way, so that there can be no misunderstanding. He uses ordinary words but in new combinations, a bit like in mathematics. Consider how “complex number” has a very specific meaning which goes beyond the common concepts of complexity and numbers. Obviously the words chosen are apposite and point in the right direction, but one could not discern the existence of the Argand plane from the words “complex number”.
In mathematics this is not so repulsive, because of the unreasonable effectiveness described famously by Wigner in 1960. This means that maths tends to lead to further insights or even technology, more than we would expect from something purely theoretical. In philosophy, there is no unreasonble effectiveness, simply new constructs which are generally further abstracted away from usefulness.(05 jun 2011)
The phrase appears in the works of Persian Sufi poets, such as Sanai and Attar of Nishapur.[1] Attar records the fable of a powerful king who asks assembled wise men to create a ring that will make him happy when he is sad, and vice versa. After deliberation the sages hand him a simple ring with the words “This too will pass” etched on it, which has the desired effect.[1](05 jun 2011)
all this relearning will one day seem hopelessly primitive(04 jun 2011)
I remember giving a talk at ACL on the corpus-based
language models used at Google, and having Fernando, then a
professor at U. Penn., comment “I feel like I’m a particle physicist
and you’ve got the only super-collider.” A few years later he moved
to Google. (On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning)(01 jun 2011)
If there is a decline in motivation, it may mean that an exceptional phase in the history of American higher education is coming to an end. That phase began after the Second World War and lasted for fifty years. Large new populations kept entering the system. First, there were the veterans who attended on the G.I. Bill—2.2 million of them between 1944 and 1956. Then came the great expansion of the nineteen-sixties, when the baby boomers entered and enrollments doubled. Then came co-education, when virtually every all-male college, apart from the military academies, began accepting women. Finally, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, there was a period of remarkable racial and ethnic diversification.
Until the twentieth century, that was the way it worked here, too. In the nineteenth century, a college degree was generally not required for admission to law school or medical school, and most law students and medical students did not bother to get one. Making college a prerequisite for professional school was possibly the most important reform ever made in American higher education. It raised the status of the professions, by making them harder to enter, and it saved the liberal-arts college from withering away. This is why liberal education is the élite type of college education: it’s the gateway to the high-status professions. And this is what people in other parts of the world mean when they say they want American-style higher education. They want the liberal arts and sciences.
Professors say that the only aspect of their teaching that matters professionally is student course evaluations, since these can figure in tenure and promotion decisions
But, as private colleges became more selective, public colleges became more accommodating. Proportionally, the growth in higher education since 1945 has been overwhelmingly in the public sector. In 1950, there were about 1.14 million students in public colleges and universities and about the same number in private ones. Today, public colleges enroll almost fifteen million students, private colleges fewer than six million.
There is now a seat for virtually anyone with a high-school diploma who wants to attend college. The City University of New York (my old employer) has two hundred and twenty-eight thousand undergraduates—more than four times as many as the entire Ivy League. The big enchilada of public higher education, the State of California, has ten university campuses, twenty-three state-college campuses, a hundred and twelve community-college campuses, and more than 3.3 million students. Six per cent of the American population is currently enrolled in college or graduate school. In Great Britain and France, the figure is about three per cent.
Almost all the élite colleges saw a jump in applications this year, partly because they now recruit much more aggressively internationally, and acceptance rates were correspondingly lower. Columbia, Yale, and Stanford admitted less than eight per cent of their applicants. This degree of selectivity is radical. To put it in some perspective: the acceptance rate at Cambridge is twenty-one per cent, and at Oxford eighteen per cent.
Johnson’s visits were a risky affair for the casinos. He ruined
Tropicana’s table games revenue in April, driving the casino into
the red for blackjack. Monthly revenue figures compiled by New
Jersey gaming regulators show that casinos had lost money on
blackjack only six other times in Atlantic City’s 33-year history
of legalized gambling.
Graced with the sober mien of the Minnesotan male, Mr Pawlenty calls to mind the old joke about the Norwegian farmer who loved his wife so much he told her.(31 may 2011)
The answering of one’s critics has always struck me as doing about as much good as fighting crabgrass with manure.(31 may 2011)
The implication is that MacArthur was expecting, or at least looking for, non-reciprocal T/V usage, in which he would address Harriman by his first name and would get title and last name — “General MacArthur” — in return.(31 may 2011)
The problem with compiled applications is that even a small source code change causes a disproportional number of byte level changes. When you add a few lines of code, for example, a range check to prevent a buffer overrun, all the subsequent code gets moved to make room for the new instructions. The compiled code is full of internal references where some instruction or datum contains the address (or offset) of another instruction or datum. It only takes a few source changes before almost all of these internal pointers have a different value, and there are a lot of them - roughly half a million in a program the size of chrome.dll.
The source code does not have this problem because all the entities in the source are symbolic. Functions don’t get committed to a specific address until very late in the compilation process, during assembly or linking. If we could step backwards a little and make the internal pointers symbolic again, could we get smaller updates?(31 may 2011)
Competitive bidding for top students has been abandoned or minimized as the colleges have shifted to the policy of grants only in case of need and limited to extent of need….The spiraling cost of competitive bidding was enough of a nightmare to persuade the stubborn, and the waste of funds by scholarships to many who did not need them while deserving students lost a chance of an education was intolerable. The rapidity of the retreat from that form of recruitment is perhaps the strongest evidence of its evils, and the testimony comes from full experience.(31 may 2011)
Intelligent Virtue presents a distinctive new account of virtue and happiness as central ethical ideas. Annas argues that exercising a virtue involves practical reasoning of a kind which can illuminatingly be compared to the kind of reasoning we find in someone exercising a practical skill. Rather than asking at the start how virtues relate to rules, principles, maximizing, or a final end, we should look at the way in which the acquisition and exercise of virtue can be seen to be in many ways like the acquisition and exercise of more mundane activities, such as farming, building or playing the piano. This helps us to see virtue as part of an agent’s happiness or flourishing, and as constituting (wholly, or in part) that happiness. We are offered a better understanding of the relation between virtue as an ideal and virtue in everyday life, and the relation between being virtuous and doing the right thing.(31 may 2011)
It is intended to give practical demonstrations of these principles with the plant illustrated. As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind. More important than all of this, however, will be the transmission of power, without wires, which will be shown on a scale large enough to carry conviction. (Wardenclyffe Tower - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(30 may 2011)
Paul’s habit of prefacing every show-offy bit of data with “if I’m not mistaken” is a sign that, in the ways that count, he is. He is another classic Woody Allen type, the know-it-all pseudo-intellectual, and as such the obvious foil for Mr. Wilson’s passionate, self-deprecating schlemiel. If Paul ever met T. S. Eliot, he would spout revised footnotes for “The Waste Land.” For his part, Gil cries out, “Prufrock is my mantra!”
My argument has always been that what you learn from using the skills you have—analyzing your strengths and weaknesses—is far more important. If you can program yourself to learn from your experiences by assiduously reviewing what worked and what did not, and why, success in chess can be very valuable indeed.(30 may 2011)
Toby to Will: "tell them what you want and then expect it… show some leadership skills"(30 may 2011)
Petrichor (pronounced /ˈpɛtrɨkər/; from Greekpetra “stone” + ichor the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology) is the name of the scent of rain on dry earth.
The term was coined in 1964 by two Australian researchers, Bear and Thomas, for an article in the journal Nature.[1] In the article, the authors describe how the smell derives from an oil exuded by certain plants during dry periods, whereupon it is absorbed by clay-based soils and rocks. During rain, the oil is released into the air along with another compound, geosmin, producing the distinctive scent. In a follow-up paper, Bear and Thomas (1965) showed that the oil retards seed germination and early plant growth.[2]
While her diplomat father courted Hitler, Martha Dodd courted Thomas Wolfe, who likened her to “a butterfly hovering around my penis”(29 may 2011)
Force a writer to be brief and you force him to think clearly—if he can. No, I don’t think that “War and Peace” would have profited from being written in 140-character tweets. But I do think that our impatient age might just be getting the best out of a great many artists and thinkers who, left to their own devices, would never have learned how to cut to the chase. (Get to the Good Part: In Praise of Shortened Attention Spans | Sightings by Terry Teachout - WSJ.com)(29 may 2011)
“In an egalitarian world, everyone is equal, except perhaps the managers of equality. And certainly in the foreseeable future, there will be endless and not unprofitable work for those whose business it is to spell out in ever greater detail the rules of the game of life, and to adjudicate conflict, and to teach the benighted what thoughts a just society requires. Politics will have died, but everything will be politics.”
A consignment of Friendly Floatee toys, manufactured in China for The First Years Inc., departed from Hong Kong on a container ship destined for Tacoma, Washington, U.S.. On 10 January 1992, during a storm in the North Pacific Ocean close to the International Date Line, twelve 40-foot (13.3 m) intermodal containers were washed overboard. One of these containers held 28,800 Floatees,[1] a child’s bath toy which came in a number of forms: red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and yellow ducks. At some point, the container opened (possibly due to collision with other containers or the ship itself) and the Floatees were released. Although each toy was mounted in a plastic housing attached to a backing card, subsequent tests showed that the cardboard quickly degraded in sea water allowing the Floatees to escape. Unlike many bath toys, Friendly Floatees have no holes in them so they do not take on water.
Seattle oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham, who were working on an ocean surface current model, began to track their progress. The mass release of 28,800 objects into the ocean at one time offered significant advantages over the standard method of releasing 500–1000 drift bottles. The recovery rate of objects from the Pacific Ocean is typically around 2%, so rather than the 10 to 20 recoveries typically seen with a drift bottle release, the two scientists expected numbers closer to 600. They were already tracking various other spills of flotsam, including 61,000Nike running shoes that had been lost overboard in 1990.
Ten months after the incident, the first Floatees began to wash up along the Alaskan coast. The first discovery consisted of ten toys found by a beachcomber near Sitka, Alaska on 16 November 1992, about 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from their starting point. Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham contacted beachcombers, coastal workers, and local residents to locate hundreds of the beached Floatees over a 530 mile (850 km) shoreline. Another beachcomber discovered twenty of the toys on 28 November 1992, and in total 400 were found along the eastern coast of the Gulf of Alaska in the period up to August 1993. This represented a 1.4% recovery rate. The landfalls were logged in Ingraham’s computer model OSCUR (Ocean Surface Currents Simulation), which uses measurements of air pressure from 1967 onwards to calculate the direction of and speed of wind across the oceans, and the consequent surface currents. Ingraham’s model was built to help fisheries but it is also used to predict flotsam movements or the likely locations of those lost at sea.
you know a lot of people talk about the "startup culture," the fire these guys have, but you go to general assembly on a saturday night and nobody's there(28 may 2011)
the uninsurable variance, de…fined as the average variance that would obtain if there were no belief disagreements, and the speculative variance, de…fined as the residual variance that results from speculative trades based on belief disagreements. Financial innovation always decreases the uninsurable variance because new assets increase the possibilities for risk sharing. My main result shows that …financial innovation also always increases the speculative variance. This is true even if traders completely agree about the payoffs of new assets. The intuition behind this result is the hedge-more/bet-more effect: Traders use new assets to hedge their bets on existing assets, which in turn enables them to place larger bets and take on greater risks(24 may 2011)
"He and I came to loggerheads over the thing…"(24 may 2011)
Graham is so optimistic about Grubwithus that he refers to it as a potential “square on the periodic table”—a company that seems almost organically preordained, like Twitter and Facebook. (Y Combinator Is Boot Camp for Startups | Magazine)(24 may 2011)
'"keystone scenes" that are designed to be memorable. think darth vader cutting off luke's hand'(23 may 2011)
Great saying about someone who is incredibly nice and honest: “you could play poker over the telephone with these guys”(21 may 2011)
Sarah Silverman, for instance, whose memoir, The Bedwetter, published last year, was spiky and loud. Silverman doesn’t so much agonize inwardly about her problems as aggressively exorcise them. In her book, she wrings laughs from serious confessions about her own troubled past, with chapter titles such as “An Emotionally Disturbed Teenager Is Given a Bottomless Well of Insanely Addictive Drugs As a Means to Improve Her Life, and Other Outstanding Achievements for the New Hampshire Mental Health Community”(20 may 2011)
screenplay plot pyramid, theme vs. foil with a twisted theme somewhere in the middle (the rock: honor, dishonor, and a dishonarable means to an honorable end)(19 may 2011)
two types of editors, launching vs. landing, (commissioning vs. cleaning)(19 may 2011)
"troughs on 'current events'" (trough, v., intr.) To feed at or as at a trough; to feed swinishly.(19 may 2011)
The upside of web-based journalism is that everybody gets a chance. The downside is that everybody gets a chance. I can’t really get on board with the demonization of credentials with phrases like “the media elite” (just like doctors, airline pilots and presidents, I prefer reporters and commentators to be elite) and the glamorization of inexperience with phrases like “citizen journalist.” (Aaron Sorkin: What I Read - Business - The Atlantic Wire)(18 may 2011)
immanent
im⋅ma⋅nent /’ɪmənənt/
adjective
of a mental act performed entirely within the mind • a cognition is an immanent act of mind
of qualities that are spread throughout something • ambition is immanent in human nature • we think of God as immanent in nature(18 may 2011)
all the specialness that comes from the fact that programs made of text(17 may 2011)
sv cos make more sense as teams within the research arm of a massive corp(15 may 2011)
There are many good technical and management/organizational arguments you can make for and against macros. What I’ve come to realize is they’re all pretty much irrelevant. The entire point of programming is automation. The question that immediately comes to mind after you learn this fact is – why not program a computer to program itself? Macros are a simple mechanism for generating code, in other words, automating programming. Unless your system includes a better mechanism for automating programming (so far, I have not seen any such mechanisms), not having macros means that you basically don’t understand why you are writing code. (Loper OS» Of Lisp Macros and Washing Machines)(13 may 2011)
“My mother explained the magic with this machine the very, very first day. She said, “Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry; the machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.” Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children’s books. And mother got time to read for me. She loved this. I got the “ABC.” This is where I started my career as a professor, when my mother had time to read for me. And she also got books for herself. She managed to study English and learn that as a foreign language. And she read so many novels, so many different novels here. And we really, we really loved this machine. And what we said, my mother and me, “Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station. And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books.”” (Loper OS» Of Lisp Macros and Washing Machines)(13 may 2011)
At one level, this is fine McKillip, if not perhaps her most compelling
story. At another, I wonder if there isn’t some sort of meta-fictional
auto-critique going on. Further comments are ROT-13’d for possible spoilers.
Guvf vf gur svefg fgbel V’ir ernq ol ZpXvyyvc jurer bar bs gur punenpgref jnf,
va snpg, n jevgre, naq n jevgre bs snagnfgvp fgbevrf ng gung. Gur rpubrf
orgjrra Tjraqbyla’f fgbevrf naq gur bar ZpXvyyvc vf jevgvat srry yvxr gurl
bhtug gb zrna fbzrguvat, ohg V pna’g dhvgr fnl jung. Naq V jbaqre vs rira gur
evghnyf qrsvavat Lfnob’f irefvba bs Nvfyvaa Ubhfr (“rvgure nofheq be unhagvatyl
ribpngvir”, nf bar punenpgre fnlf) ner fhccbfrq gb, va fbzr jnl, rpub
ZpXvyyvc’f bja pnerre-ybat hfr bs gur unhagvatyl ribpngvir?(12 may 2011)
The power of being able to lead groups of peers without receiving clear delegated authority.
The risk is not dissolved but rather compounded when the answering, avenging violence is staged and shot in almost exactly the same kind of gruesome detail, since the audience knows it is supposed to enjoy that. In other words, even though the earlier violation can be said to justify the later revenge, that logic turns out to be reversible. You could call this the ‘I Spit on Your Grave’ paradigm. It is definitely at work in ‘Sucker Punch,’ which gains in sleaziness by coyly keeping its rape fantasies within PG-13 limits and fairly quivering with ecstasy as it contemplates scenes of female victimization.(11 may 2011)
what percentage of searches are unique?(11 may 2011)
In its early years, in the middle of the 19th century, there was some argument about whether taking pictures with a camera could legitimately be called an art, and there may be cause to wonder now if it can remain one. How can particular images hold on to their distinction, their exalted particularity? Is it by retaining trace memories of older artisanal practices and materials — by being printed on special paper, framed and composed with exquisite care, shot in studios full of expensive equipment? Or is there some less-definable expressive quality that turns the banal into the beautiful? (On (Digital) Photography - Sontag, 34 Years Later - NYTimes.com)(11 may 2011)
Photography is a kingdom of glamour and banality. The photograph, whatever its cultural pedigree, does not so much exalt the everyday as establish the aesthetic parameters, the peaks and troughs, of everydayness. The camera may record astounding events or reveal shocking truths, but always within the context of the ordinary, the literal, the real. As Roland Barthes put it in “Camera Lucida,” his graceful and disarmingly poignant meditation on the nature of the art, the photograph always says the same thing: “That has happened.” Which means that every photograph is equivalent even as each one is distinct, and that they all capture a precise present and register its conversion into an irretrievable past. Photography is the definitively modern, technologically relentless engine for the mass production of nostalgia. Video may be live, instantaneous, perpetually current, but a still photograph takes up instant residence in the archive. It gives you not the gratifications of immediacy, which moving pictures deliver so readily, but rather a teasing and endlessly seductive sense of distance. When you leaf through old albums or tickle the touch screen, you are excavating memory, traveling into the past, whether your destination is the last century or last night. (On (Digital) Photography - Sontag, 34 Years Later - NYTimes.com)(11 may 2011)
the little two-foot jutters as drew's "psychological partition"(10 may 2011)
carpool lane of relationships — they go faster because there's less traffic(10 may 2011)
Alternative vote (AV) is a type of preferential voting in which voters are asked to rank the candidates from first to last. The basic idea is that if no candidate is the first choice of 50% + 1 voters, then the candidate who received the fewest first place votes is eliminated. This candidate’s voters then have their votes reallocated to the candidate they ranked second. This reallocation process continues until one candidate achieves 50% + 1 votes (more on this later).
Symmetry breaking in physics describes a phenomenon where (infinitesimally) small fluctuations acting on a system which is crossing a critical point decide the system’s fate, by determining which branch of a bifurcation is taken. To an outside observer unaware of the fluctuations (or “noise”), the choice will appear arbitrary. This process is called symmetry “breaking”, because such transitions usually bring the system from a disorderlystate into one of two definite states. Since disorder is more symmetric, in the sense that small variations to it don’t change its overall appearance, the symmetry gets “broken”.
The successful drawing of this distinction guards Turing's 1936 analysis of computation against a difficulty that has persistently been raised against it(08 may 2011)
As with all systems characterized by a power law distribution, the most notable characteristic in a scale-free network is the relative commonness of vertices with a degree that greatly exceeds the average. The highest-degree nodes are often called “hubs”, and are thought to serve specific purposes in their networks, although this depends greatly on the domain.
The power law distribution highly influences the network topology. It turns out that the major hubs are closely followed by smaller ones. These ones, in turn, are followed by other nodes with an even smaller degree and so on. This hierarchy allows for a fault tolerant behavior. Since failures occur at random and the vast majority of nodes are those with small degree, the likelihood that a hub would be affected is almost negligible. Even if such event occurs, the network will not lose its connectedness, which is guaranteed by the remaining hubs. On the other hand, if we choose a few major hubs and take them out of the network, it simply falls apart and is turned into a set of rather isolated graphs. Thus hubs are both the strength of scale-free networks and their Achilles’ heel. These properties have been studied analytically using percolation theory by Cohen et al.[4][5] and by Callaway et al.[6](08 may 2011)
He’s an excellent conversationalist. He can talk to you for days, about you and your opinions.
If we want to work out what to believe, we need to consider all our beliefs — everything we find most plausible, and judge to be (likely) true — in wide reflective equilibrium, and work out how best to fit the various claims together: what to keep, and what to discard, to yield the overall most plausible conclusions.(07 may 2011)
[Street holds that] we must show that the evolutionary forces have led us to form true normative beliefs, and we must defend this claim without making any assumptions about which normative beliefs are true. What Street here requires us to do is impossible. Some whimsical despot might require us to show that some clock is telling the correct time, without making any assumptions about the correct time. Though we couldn’t meet this requirement, that wouldn’t show that this clock is not telling the correct time. In the same way, we couldn’t possibly show that natural selection had led us to form some true normative beliefs without making any assumptions about which normative beliefs are true. This fact does not count against the view that these normative beliefs are true.
Some whimsical despot [character in a thought experiment](07 may 2011)
think of writing an executive summary of what you did, and wanting to elaborate on all the hairy microproblems, vs. writing a precis of what you're going to do, and not yet knowing what they'll be(07 may 2011)
Sartre: "Anything would be better than this agony of mind… this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles… and caresses one and never hurts quite enough."(04 may 2011)
the importance of training within an organization(04 may 2011)
Perhaps the most significant difference, however, was that despite
the tremendous complexity of building computer systems in this manner,
customers insisted that these systems work correctly. Today, software
vendors have conditioned us to believe that bugs are an inevitable
part of software, but in the 1960’s a buggy operating system was
properly considered to be a defective product. Customers do not
pay for defective products.
This is largely a pre-ironic society. Yes, there is a rich history of satire, and modern exceptions — the ’50s also produced Jack Kerouac — but the earnestness with which people love Sachin is reflected in many aspects of the culture. There’s no place, yet, for an Indian “Daily Show.” Elephants aren’t for statues representing a bygone era, like the blue mustang outside Denver’s airport. They are for the slow lane.
Movies are expected to end a certain way. Heroes in those movies are expected to behave a certain way. In his definitive book on Mumbai, “Maximum City,” author Suketu Mehta describes an Indian audience’s reaction when the hero of a film turned out to be a terrorist. They ransacked the theater. It does not seem strange to an Indian filmgoer that the songs in the movies have nothing to do with the plot. Mehta writes:
“The suspension of disbelief in India is prompt and generous, beginning before the audience enters the theater itself. Disbelief is easy to suspend in a land where belief is so rampant and vigorous. And not just in India; audiences in the Middle East, Russia and Central Asia are also pre-cynical. They still believe in motherhood, patriotism, and true love; Hollywood and the West have moved on.”
Everything that can be clicked needs to have a hover state and preferably an action state as well. Feedback is important in good interface design. LoVe HAte: link, visited, hover, active
“All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers…. Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.” (The Atlantic)(01 may 2011)
I complain about the representations of women, but I’m more offended when in movie after movie there are no real representations to eviscerate, when all or most of the big roles are taken by men, and the only women around are those whose sole function is, essentially, to reassure the audience that the hero isn’t gay. (Women as Violent Characters in Movies - NYTimes.com)(30 apr 2011)
buttling
present participle; butled
past tense; butles
3rd person singular present; butling
present participle; buttles
3rd person singular present; buttled
past tense; buttled
past participle; butled
past participle
I’ve never viewed myself as particularly talented. I’ve viewed myself as…slightly above average in talent. Where I excel is with a ridiculous, sickening work ethic. While the other guy’s sleeping, I’m working. While the other guy’s eating, I’m working. While the other guy’s making love, I mean, I’m making love, too, but I’m working really hard at it!
A hapax legomenon is a word which occurs only once in either the written record of a language, the works of an author, or in a single text.(29 apr 2011)
If you believe inflation is coming, why don’t you go out and borrow as much money as you can? The way to profit from inflation is not to buy gold with cash. It is to buy gold (or land or oil or Austro-Hungarian postage stamps) with borrowed cash. The inflation comes along, wipes out your debt – and you own an inflation-protected asset purchased with other people’s money.(29 apr 2011)
They argue that this is no coincidence: a basic level of law and order may be necessary for pirates to ply their dangerous trade.
They reckon that this is because piracy is a “market-dependent” crime. Pirates may benefit from protection from other criminals. Selling the loot requires transport and the ability to store goods. All this requires some rule of law—but not enough to cramp bandits’ style.(29 apr 2011)
A common property of many though not all complex systems is adaptation, meaning that the collective behavior of the agents in the system results in the optimization of some feature or quantity. Biological evolution by means of natural selection is the classic example: evolution takes place as a result of the competition among the members of a breeding population for resources and is thus exclusively a result of agent interactions—precisely an emergent phenomenon in the complex systems sense.
Complex systems displaying adaptation are sometimes called “complex adaptive systems.” In constructing theories and models of complex adaptive systems the fundamental concept is that of “fitness,” a measure or value that conveys how well an individual, group, species, or strategy is doing in comparison to the competition, and hence how likely it is to thrive. In the simplest models, one posits a fitness function that maps descriptive parameters, such as body size or foraging strategy, to fitness values and then looks for parameter values that maximize the fitness.(28 apr 2011)
Borrowing an analogy from Doyne Farmer of the Santa Fe Institute, complex systems theory is not a novel, but a series of short stories.(28 apr 2011)
A pattern is precisely recognizable as a pattern because its information content is low. For instance, there is little information in a periodically repeating sequence of symbols, numbers, colors, etc. If we can accurately predict the next symbol in a sequence then that symbol contains little information since we knew what it was going to be before we saw it.(28 apr 2011)
walks out of the bathroom: “god forgive me”(28 apr 2011)
how wile e. coyote paints the tunnel and the road runner somehow goes through it(28 apr 2011)
It goes on. Krugman asserts that I and others “believe”
“that an increase in government spending cannot, under any circumstances,
increase employment,” or that we “argued that price fluctuations
and shocks to demand actually had nothing to do with the business
cycle.” These are just gross distortions, unsupported by any
documentation, let alone professional writing. And Krugman
knows better. All economic models are simplified to exhibit one point; we all
understand the real world is more complicated; and his job is supposed to be to
explain that to lay readers. It would be no different than if someone were to
look up Paul’s early work which assumed away transport costs and claim
“Paul Krugman believes ocean shipping is free,
how stupid” in the Wall Street Journal.
how the people you see in ny are en route -ej(28 apr 2011)
SCOTT: The main purpose of film criticism is the same as the main purpose of every other form of writing: to grapple with the meaning of life and provide a few moments of distraction and amusement during our busy transit toward the grave. Also to provide consumer advice and useful quotes for advertisers. (More ‘Ask the Film Critics’ - NYTimes.com)(28 apr 2011)
However, blackmail is distinguished based on the subject matter of the threat. Demands for money based on threats to do some kinds of acts (expose embarrassing information) but not others (file a lawsuit) are considered criminal.(27 apr 2011)
Blackmail criminalizes the threat to do something that would not be criminal if one actually did it.(27 apr 2011)
Rigorous codes of conduct allow people to build their character. Changes in behavior change the mind, so small acts of ritual reinforce networks in the brain. A Mormon denying herself coffee may seem like a silly thing, but regular acts of discipline can lay the foundation for extraordinary acts of self-control when it counts the most. (Creed or Chaos - NYTimes.com)(26 apr 2011)
I commit to doing X every day. Anyone who likes to can negotiate a daily rate with me, anywhere from, say, 25c to $5 per day. Every day you pay me that amount.
There are two possible "exits":
If I don't do X one day, violating my commitment, I pay you double what you've put in so far.
If you'd like, you stop paying me the daily rate at any time, in which case I capture everything you've put in so far.
how the actors' watches are set during the filiming of a movie(25 apr 2011)
rewards of some sort if an epsilon teaches you something(24 apr 2011)
gs with e ds and the refrigerator light(22 apr 2011)
You know all of those books on the market that predict various economic bubbles, social upheavals, and disasters of all kinds? Most of those authors don’t believe their predictions are likely to pan out. They’re making calculated bets that in the unlikely event they guessed right, they will become famous. That’s worth a fortune in future speaking gigs and book deals.(22 apr 2011)
Maybe it’s a sign that people miss Wallace’s consciousness so much—I often hear people ask what he would have written about WikiLeaks, say, or Twitter. More than so many writers, his work embodies the Internet age with its stylistic variance, its nonlinear structure, its obsession with pop culture—and yet tragically he’s going to miss out on so much of what develops. So what does it mean that we’re moving forward into unknown cultural territory without one of our wisest and most generous interpreters? How would you describe what we’ve lost by losing his voice? (‘The Pale King’: David Foster Wallace’s Editor on the Book’s Path to Print - Joe Fassler - Entertainment - The Atlantic)(17 apr 2011)
The player mechanism is essentially a bank of switches activated by software. The switches are pneumatically operating valves which switch on the motive force used to play the piano action. This motive force is created by switching suction into a miniature collapsible pneumatic bellows with one assembly assigned to each individual note. The valve switching system is triggered by the music roll. As the paper perforations run over the music reading bar (known as the “tracker bar”) air is allowed to enter. This causes a pressure differential within the mechanism triggering the switching valves to operate. The note channels can be either on or off hence the music roll can be regarded as an early form of programmable binary software.
Edison presented his own account of inventing the phonograph. “I was experimenting,” he said, “on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking-machine of to-day. The platen had a spiral groove on its surface, like the disk. Over this was placed a circular disk of paper; an electromagnet with the embossing point connected to an arm travelled over the disk; and any signals given through the magnets were embossed on the disk of paper. If this disc was removed from the machine and put on a similar machine provided with a contact point, the embossed record would cause the signals to be repeated into another wire. The ordinary speed of telegraphic signals is thirty-five to forty words a minute; but with this machine several hundred words were possible.”
“From my experiments on the telephone I knew of how to work a pawl connected to the diaphragm; and this engaging a ratchet-wheel served to give continuous rotation to a pulley. This pulley was connected by a cord to a little paper toy representing a man sawing wood. Hence, if one shouted: ’ Mary had a little lamb,’ etc., the paper man would start sawing wood. I reached the conclusion that if I could record the movements of the diaphragm properly, I could cause such records to reproduce the original movements imparted to the diaphragm by the voice, and thus succeed in recording and reproducing the human voice.”
“Instead of using a disk I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm. A sketch was made, and the piece-work price, $18, was marked on the sketch. I was in the habit of marking the price I would pay on each sketch. If the workman lost, I would pay his regular wages; if he made more than the wages, he kept it. The workman who got the sketch was John Kruesi. I didn’t have much faith that it would work, expecting that I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope of a future for the idea. Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted ‘Mary had a little lamb’, etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of.”
Cros proposed the use of photoengraving, a process already in use to make metal printing plates from line drawings, to convert an insubstantial phonautograph tracing in soot into a groove or ridge on a metal disc or cylinder. This metal surface would then be given the same motion and speed as the original recording surface. A stylus linked to a diaphragm would be made to ride in the groove or on the ridge so that the stylus would be moved back and forth in accordance with the recorded vibrations. It would transmit these vibrations to the connected diaphragm, and the diaphragm would transmit them to the air, reproducing the original sound.
Charles Cros, a French poet and amateur scientist, is the first person known to have made the conceptual leaps from recording sound as a traced line to the theoretical possibility of reproducing the sound from the tracing and then to a definite method for accomplishing the reproduction. On April 30, 1877, he deposited a sealed envelope containing a summary of his ideas with the French Academy of Sciences, a standard procedure used by scientists and inventors to establish priority of conception of unpublished ideas in the event of any later dispute.
khanacademy-style lectures for a project euler course, mixed with some “learn python the hard way” material(17 apr 2011)
Alterity is a philosophical term meaning “otherness”, strictly being in the sense of the other of two (Latin alter). It is generally now taken as the philosophical principle of exchanging one’s own perspective for that of the “other (alterity in English - Google Dictionary)(16 apr 2011)
Such a continual budding process, which is the way the first modern humans expanded around the world, is known to produce what biologists call a serial founder effect. Each time a smaller group moves away, there is a reduction in its genetic diversity. The reduction in phonemic diversity over increasing distances from Africa, as seen by Dr. Atkinson, parallels the reduction in genetic diversity already recorded by biologists. (Languages Grew From a Seed in Africa, a Study Says - NYTimes.com)(16 apr 2011)
"I've learned from my experiences that I couldn't sell you cigarettes if you were a lifetime smoker, with a new set of lungs, at half price."(16 apr 2011)
Burstiness:
With many time-series if the series is averaged then the data begins to look smoother. However, with self-similar data, one is confronted with traces which are spiky and bursty, even at large scales.(16 apr 2011)
I have definitely become more of a morning person since becoming a dad, but not because the kid wakes me up. My wife handles the baby in the morning. I just find myself waking up early so I can spend some time with the baby before I have to work.
The damaged-infant trope is perfect because it captures the mix of repulsion and love the fiction writer feels for something he’s working on. The fiction always comes out so horrifically defective, so hideous a betrayal of all your hopes for it -– a cruel and repellent caricature of the perfection of its conception (Remembering David Foster Wallace)(14 apr 2011)
conference call with the family = a sketch(13 apr 2011)
Once I became a dad, I noticed that parents around me had a different take on the power of nurture. I saw them turning parenthood into a chore—shuttling their kids to activities even the kids didn’t enjoy, forbidding television, desperately trying to make their babies eat another spoonful of vegetables. Parents’ main rationale is that their effort is an investment in their children’s future; they’re sacrificing now to turn their kids into healthy, smart, successful, well-adjusted adults. But according to decades of twin research, their rationale is just, well, wrong. High-strung parenting isn’t dangerous, but it does make being a parent a lot more work and less fun than it has to be.(13 apr 2011)
In “The Little Schemer” Friedman and Felleisen lay out the following basic pattern for writing recursive functions.
Establish a terminating condition.
Accumulate the results of the recursion.
Change some argument in the recursive call to move closer to the terminating condition.
Some of the greatest minds in modern criticism and philosophy have pondered the meaning of Bartleby’s refusal to work. Their interpretations range from brilliant to clever to silly. I would only add that there is nothing particularly surprising about Bartleby’s one-man job-action. I wouldn’t want to copy a five-hundred-page legal document “closely written in crimpy hand” either. And once I realized what I could get away with—get away without—why stop there? By withdrawing his labor, he forces us to recognize that what he does is labor. To recognize that paperwork is also work.
No, there’s nothing very mysterious about Bartleby’s motivations. The narrator’s willingness to tolerate this work stoppage is what needs to be explained. Rather than beat him up or lock him out or have him arrested—the traditional ways of responding to striking workers in industrial America—the lawyer holds onto the scrivener. One of the best essays written on this subject is by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, who insists that this story is more about the narrator than the narrated. As the story proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear that the lawyer identifies with his clerk. To be sure, it is an ambivalent identification, but that only makes it all the more powerful.
Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when, without moving from his privacy, Bartleby, in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.”
I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties. Immediately it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my request in the clearest tone I could assume, but in quite as clear a one came the previous reply, “I would prefer not to.”
“Prefer not to,” echoed I, rising in high excitement and crossing the room with a stride. “What do you mean? Are you moonstruck? I want you to help me compare this sheet here—take it,” and I thrust it toward him.
Consider, for a moment, the word “value.” When economists talk about value they are really talking about money–or, more precisely, about whatever it is that money is measuring; also, whatever it is that economic actors are assumed to be pursuing. When we are working for a living, or buying and selling things, we are rewarded with money. But whenever we are not working or buying or selling, when we are motivated by pretty much anything other than the desire to get money, we suddenly find ourselves in the domain of “values.” The most commonly invoked of these are, of course, “family values” (which is unsurprising, since by far the most common form of unpaid labor in most industrial societies is child-rearing and housework), but we also talk about religious values, political values, the values that attach themselves to art or patriotism–one could even, perhaps, count loyalty to one’s favorite basketball team. All are seen as commitments that are, or ought to be, uncorrupted by the market. At the same time, they are also seen as utterly unique; whereas money makes all things comparable, “values” such as beauty, devotion, or integrity cannot, by definition, be compared. There is no mathematical formula that could possibly allow one to calculate just how much personal integrity it is right to sacrifice in the pursuit of art or how to balance responsibilities to your family with responsibilities to your God. (Obviously, people do make these kinds of compromises all the time. But they cannot be calculated.) One might put it this way: if value is simply what one considers important, then money allows importance to take a liquid form, by enabling us to compare precise quantities of importance and trade one off for the other. If someone does accumulate a very large amount of money, the first thing he or she is likely to do is to try to convert it into something unique, whether it be Monet’s water lilies, a prizewinning racehorse, or an endowed chair at a university.
What is really at stake here in any market economy is precisely the ability to make these trades, to convert “value” into “values.” All of us are striving to put ourselves in a position in which we can dedicate ourselves to something larger than ourselves. When liberals do well in America, it’s because they can embody that possibility
Why do working-class Bush voters tend to resent intellectuals more than they do the rich? It seems to me that the answer is simple. They can imagine a scenario in which they might become rich but cannot possibly imagine one in which they, or any of their children, would become members of the intelligentsia. If you think about it, this is not an unreasonable assessment. A mechanic from Nebraska knows it is highly unlikely that his son or daughter will ever become an Enron executive. But it is possible. There is virtually no chance, however, that his child, no matter how talented, will ever become an international human-rights lawyer or a drama critic for the New York Times. Here we need to remember not just the changes in higher education but also the role of unpaid, or effectively unpaid, internships. It has become a fact of life in the United States that if one chooses a career for any reason other than the salary, for the first year or two one will not be paid. This is certainly true if one wishes to be involved in altruistic pursuits: say, to join the world of charities, or NGOs, or to become a political activist. But it is equally true if one wants to pursue values like Beauty or Truth: to become part of the world of books, or the art world, or an investigative reporter. The custom effectively seals off such a career for any poor student who actually does attain a liberal arts education. Such structures of exclusion had always existed, of course, especially at the top, but in recent decades fences have become fortresses. (Sleepykid» Army of Altruists)(13 apr 2011)
Keep your functions short. A good function fits on a slide that the people in the last row of a big room can comfortably read. (Felix’s Node.js Style Guide)(13 apr 2011)
What we cannot know is how far we have yet to go in understanding, predicting, and manipulating human behavior on the large scale. Imagine us all two hundred years into the future, on a planet much hotter and more crowded than we have now. Will we really still be surprised by sudden movements of large populations, great shocks inflicted by minor actors, and widely fluctuating electoral flip-flops?
Among R.A. Fisher’s several works of public-relations genius, the greatest was the appropriation of the word significant to mean “having a low probability of occurrence if the null hypothesis is true”.(10 apr 2011)
can computers think? rebutting the standard arguments against, sort of as an faq(09 apr 2011)
To teach is to learn twice. (Joseph Joubert, Pensées, 1842)
It was in trying to capture that hectic, chaotic reality — and the nuanced, conflicted, ever-mutating thoughts of his characters — that Wallace’s synesthetic prose waxed so prolix, his sentences unspooling into tangled skeins of words, replete with qualifying phrases and garrulous footnotes. And this is why his novels, stories and articles so often defied closure and grew and grew and grew, sprouting tendrils and digressions and asides — because in almost everything Wallace wrote, including “The Pale King,” he aimed to use words to lasso and somehow subdue the staggering, multifarious, cacophonous predicament that is modern American life. (‘The Pale King’ by David Foster Wallace - Book Review - NYTimes.com)(08 apr 2011)
Being able to write isn’t the same as “being smarter than everyone else.”(08 apr 2011)
Reflective balloons floating in the upper atmosphere could create shade. The number and/or size of the balloons would necessarily be great. Geoffrey A. Landis has suggested[6] that if enough floating cities were built, they could form a solar shield around the planet, and could simultaneously be used to process the atmosphere into a more desirable form, thus combining the solar shield theory and the atmospheric processing theory with a scalable technology that would immediately provide living space in the Venerian atmosphere. (Terraforming of Venus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(08 apr 2011)
do japanese people do fake english the way we do fake japanese?(07 apr 2011)
“that unattainable but inescapable American-ness of carefree debonair casual excellence”(06 apr 2011)
The very best books in categories you think you cannot stand (“gardening,” “basketball,” whatever) will be superb. It is not hard to find out what they are.
probably oughta say "cut the mustard" more often(06 apr 2011)
I am sure that the figurative language I am using to describe Hearsay II would not have been that chosen by its developers, but I am trying to get across an image that it undeniably created in me, since that image then formed the nucleus of my own subsequent research projects in AI. Some other crucial features of the Hearsay II architecture that I have hinted at but cannot describe here in detail were its deep parallelism, in which processes of all sorts operated on many levels of abstraction at the same time, and its uniquely flexible manner of allowing a constant intermingling of bottom-up processing (i.e., the building-up of higher levels of abstraction on top of fairly solid lower-level hypotheses, much like the construction of a building) and top-down processing (i.e., the attempt to build plausible hypotheses close to the raw data in order to give a solid underpinning to hypotheses that make sense at abstract levels, something like constructing lower and lower floors after the top floors have been built and are sitting suspended in thin air).(05 apr 2011)
A key event in my personal evolution as an AI researcher was a visit I made to Carnegie-Mellon University’s Computer Science Department in 1976. While there, I had the good fortune to talk with some of the developers of the Hearsay II program, whose purpose was to be able to recognize spoken utterances. They had made an elegant movie to explain their work, which they showed me. The movie began by graphically conveying the immense difficulty of the task, and then in clear pictorial terms showed their strategy for dealing with the problem.
The basic idea was to take a raw speech signal—a waveform, in other words, which could be seen on a screen as a constantly changing oscilloscope trace—and to produce from it a hierarchy of “translations” on different levels of abstraction. The first level above the raw waveform would thus be a segmented waveform, consisting of an attempt to break the waveform up into a series of nonoverlapping segments, each of which would hopefully correspond to a single phoneme in the utterance. The next level above that would be a set of phonetic labels attached to each segment, which would serve as a bridge to the next level up, namely a phonemic hypothesis as to what phoneme had actually been uttered, such as “o” or “u” or “d” or “t.” Above the phonemic level was the syllabic level, consisting, of course, in hypothesized syllables such as “min” or “pit” or “blag.” Then there was the word level, which needs little explanation, and above that the phrase level (containing such hypothesized utterance-fragments as “when she went there” or “under the table”). One level higher was the sentence level, which was just below the uppermost level, which was called the pragmatic level.
At that level, the meaning of the hypothesized sentence was compared to the situation under discussion (Hearsay always interpreted what it heard in relation to a specific real-world context such as an ongoing chess game, not in a vacuum); if it made sense in the given context, it was accepted, whereas if it made no sense in the context, then some piece of the hypothesized sentence—its weakest piece, in fact, in a sense that I will describe below—was modified in such a way as to make the sentence fit the situation (assuming that such a simple fix was possible, of course). For example, if the program’s best guess as to what it had heard was the sentence “There’s a pen on the box” but in fact, in the situation under discussion there was a pen that was in a box rather than on it, and if furthermore the word “on” was the least certain word in the hypothesized sentence, then a switch to “There’s a pen in the box” might have a high probability of being suggested. If, on the other hand, the word “on” was very clear and strong whereas the word “pen” was the least certain element in the sentence, then the sentence might be converted into “There’s a pin on the box.” Of course, that sentence would be suggested as an improvement over the original one only if it made sense within the context.
This idea of making changes according to expectations (i.e., long-term knowledge of how the world usually is, as well as the specifics of the current situation) was a very beautiful one, in my opinion, but it caused no end of complexity in the program’s architecture. In particular, as soon as the program made a guess at a new sentence—such as converting “There’s a pen on the box” into “There’s a pen in the box”—it took the new word and tried to modify its underpinnings, such as its syllables, the phonemes below them, their phonetic labels, and possibly even the boundary lines of segments in the waveform, in an attempt to see if the revised sentence was in any way justifiable in terms of the sounds actually produced. If not, it would be rejected, no matter how strong was its appeal at the pragmatic level. And while all this work was going on, the program would simultaneously be working on new incoming waveforms and on other types of possible rehearings of the old sentence.
The preceding discussion implies that each aspect of the utterance at each level of abstraction was represented as a type of hypothesis, attached to which was a set of pieces of evidence supporting the given hypothesis. Thus attached to a proposed syllable such as “tik” were little structures indicating the degree of certainty of its component phonemes, and the probability of correctness of any words in which it figured. The fact that plausibility values or levels of confidence were attached to every hypothesis imbued the current best guess with an implicit “halo” of alternate interpretations, any one of which could step in if the best guess was found to be inappropriate.(05 apr 2011)
Sadly, Bongard’s insights did not have much effect on either the AI world or the PR world, even though in some sense his puzzles provide a bridge between the two worlds, and suggest a deep interconnection. However, they certainly had a far-reaching effect on me, in that they pointed out that perception is far more than the recognition of members of already-established categories—it involves the spontaneous manufacture of new categories at arbitrary levels of abstraction.(05 apr 2011)
digital letter errors vs. handwritten letter errors(04 apr 2011)
part of the reason I like that kind of e-mail has to do with how wrapped up my ego is, intellectually and emotionally, in those sorts of exchanges(04 apr 2011)
Attract the attention of and detain (someone) in conversation, typically against his or her will
elenctic: Serving to refute. Refutative. Applied to indirect modes of proof, and opposed to ‘deictic’. ..(03 apr 2011)
In test-driven development (TDD) the mantra has always been red: write a failing test and run it, green: make the test pass, and refactor: look at the code and see if you can make it any better.
Then there’s the fact that high-stakes poker rewards aggression. A player who cannot fire off a bluff because he is worried about his daughter’s private-school tuition will be quickly run over by the players who don’t have such concerns. While heightened dexterity, comfort with snap decisions and the stamina gained from years spent sitting in front of a computer screen give the young online pro an edge over his older counterpart, the greatest benefit borne from a life spent playing video games lies somewhere in the strange, disconnected relationship between what is simulated and what is real. The armies of Command and Conquer do not suffer real casualties. An unsuccessful session of Minesweeper does not result in the loss of a leg.
In online poker, lost money registers only as debits in the player’s offshore account. When a player loses a million-dollar pot, the action plays out in cartoon animation.
“Most of us young kids who play at nosebleed stakes don’t really have any clear idea about the actual value of the money we win or lose,” Cates says. “Most of us see the money more as a points system. And because we’re all competitive, we want to have the highest score. But really, we don’t know what making $400,000 or losing $800,000 means, because we don’t have families or whatever. This blind spot gives us the freedom to always make the right move, regardless of the amount at stake, because our judgment isn’t clouded by any possible ramifications.”(01 apr 2011)
Meteorologists are one group that has a ready grasp of this idea. They receive a huge amount of data, which they process in a highly sophisticated way, translating it into stunning graphics – and there they are on prime-time TV presenting the weather while we all watch. This is exactly what we strive to emulate. We want our economic indicators, our social indicators and our environmental indicators to be communicated on prime-time television with the same level of efficiency.(01 apr 2011)
It is frequently said that ethics cannot be taught. Upon examination this assertion usually means that moral values cannot be forced down a student’s throat, that no coercive tactics seem to work. The assertion usually masks an explicit effort to “teach” some specific moral value to a student — an effort that invariably fails. I generally take encouragement from such accounts because they tend to confirm that students are not mindless and demand to be taken seriously.(01 apr 2011)
Out there, in the Mojave’s industrial context, where lots of things are happening on the scale of the global economy, having 250 or 2,500 acres of mirrors making steam to turn a turbine is not that weird.(31 mar 2011)
In the framing era what distinguished “wars” from other forms of international interactions was the jus ad bellum. And, under that law, the distinguishing characteristic of a “war” was that it opened up the nation to lawful retaliation, giving the target nation a lawful privilege to kill U.S. soldiers.(31 mar 2011)
I find that my combination of views is fairly rare. People who believe that ethics is objective and intuitive are often quite keen to make a lot of detailed pronouncements about the content of those ethics. The agnostics tend to be relativists or subjectivists. It seems to me that people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those views by the mood. I call this the “fallacy of mood affiliation,” and it is one of the most underreported fallacies in human reasoning. (In the context of economic growth debates, the underlying mood is often “optimism” or “pessimism” per se and then a bunch of ought-to-be-independent views fall out from the chosen mood.)(31 mar 2011)
software as "words that go" (wilkerson)(30 mar 2011)
Halmos, the
famous Hungarian expositor of mathematics, said that the secret to
learning mathematics was “examples”. When asked the secret to
learning physics, Feynman said “examples”. (Proposal for an Exercise-Pedia)(30 mar 2011)
For many years I wondered why it was even possible to say nonsense
in natural language, such as English; after all, evolution does not
have time to waste and life has been serious business for many
millennia; why would a language containing nonsense sentences arise?
Aren’t they a waste at best and dangerous at worst? Nonsense persists
because orthogonality is the optimal solution to the
mapping-language-to-reality problem and linguistic power results in
nonsense corners; they must simply be tolerated. (On the Aesthetic of Programming: Towards Academics and Engineers Talking Usefully About Programming Languages)(30 mar 2011)
The primary concern of senior software engineers working on large
programs is how to appropriately factor the code: how to
obtain large complex behavior as a product of simpler and independent
modules. Done right, factoring effectively takes the logarithm of the
complexity of a problem, as the results are a product of that
of the modules whereas the difficulty is only a sum.
Obtaining a well-factored program is the major concern for
most engineers and seems completely unaddressed by the programming
languages community; until very recently I had never heard the word
“re-factor” in any computer science class ever. Factoring works, but
no one knows how it is done exactly; it is just a subtle emergent fact
about engineering that it is possible and effective.
[After going on for 7 paragraphs about the best methods of sweeping
the streets of Philadelphia] Some may think these trifling matters not
worth minding or relating; but when they consider that tho’ dust blown
into the eyes of a single person, or into a single shop on a windy
day, is but of small importance, yet the great number of the instances
in a populous city, and its frequent repetitions give it weight and
consequence, perhaps they will not censure very severely those who
bestow some attention to affairs of this seemingly low nature. Human
felicity is produc’d not so much by great pieces of good fortune that
seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day. —
Benjamin Franklin
of a largely extracurricular general education — a work that
taught us, on the cusp of the latest Information Age, that we ourselves
could bridge the gap between C.P. Snow’s “two cultures,”
between left-brain and right-brain concerns and approaches, and
that our new computers (along with new approaches to mathematics,
and music, and art) might help us to do so. Indeed, by encompassing
and synthesizing aspects of these very diverse fields Hofstadter
has helped us to understand that perhaps what is most important
in human cognition takes place in some holistic center, some core
of our mind, rather than on the “right” or the “left”
side of our crania. (Presidential Lectures: Douglas R. Hofstadter)
I made depreciation for one year (one quarter of $500 = $125) go away from the “furniture” account. Intuitively, this means that the balance of the “furniture” account is the value that your furniture still has now. Each year, you add another $125 edge from “furniture” to “depreciation”, until after four years, the balance of “furniture” drops to zero (Accounting for Computer Scientists — Martin Kleppmann‘s blog)(29 mar 2011)
Recipe for french toast: break two eggs into a bowl, add a splash of milk, mix thoroughly with a fork. Dip slices of bread into bowl. Fry in butter in your cast iron pan at medium heat. Eat with maple syrup. And don’t believe anyone who tells you more ingredients are necessary.
You can “bake” a potato by prodding it a few times with a fork, then putting it on a napkin or plate, microwaving it for 7 minutes, and adding butter. I don’t know of any other form of healthy, natural food that’s as cheap and easy as this.(28 mar 2011)
the idea seems to be that electrons move from one part of a protein to another part via quantum tunneling. The potential that allows this to happen is only set up if you have the right chemical involved, which is how the protein purportedly “smells” the existence of this chemical.(28 mar 2011)
calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.(28 mar 2011)
Early on, he expelled the Italian community, forcing its members to exhume the bodies of Italians from Libyan graveyards to take home. (The Ego Advantage - NYTimes.com)(28 mar 2011)
On the definition of “kernel”, Jochen Liedtke said that the word is “traditionally used to denote the part of the operating system that is mandatory and common to all other software.”[3] Most operating systems rely on this concept of the kernel. The existence of a kernel is a natural consequence of designing a computer system as a series of abstraction layers,[4] each relying on the functions of layers beneath it. The kernel, from this viewpoint, is simply the name given to the lowest level of abstraction that is implemented in software. (Kernel (computing) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(27 mar 2011)
This one’s not about studying directly, but it bears on the AA findings about group versus solitary studying, and the merits of solitude in general:
…sharing an experience with someone is inherently distracting, because it compels us to expend energy on imagining what the other person is going through and how they’re reacting to it….“People tend to engage quite automatically with thinking about the minds of other people,” Burum said in an interview. “We’re multitasking when we’re with other people in a way that we’re not when we just have an experience by ourselves.” When we let our focus shift away from the people and things around us, we are better able to engage in what’s called meta-cognition, or the process of thinking critically and reflectively about our own thoughts.
discomfited - defeated: disappointingly unsuccessful; “disappointed expectations and thwarted ambitions”; “their foiled attempt to capture Calais”; “many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers”; “his best efforts were thwarted”
- The Idiot. I was once partners in a VC fund with a guy who was an ex managing director at CS First Boston. He had negotiated hundreds of leverage finance deals. He was a genius negotiator and everyone liked doing business with him (which is hard for me to pull off when I’m negotiating). His favorite technique in the middle of a negotiation would be to raise his hands up in the air and say, “Listen. Lets take a step back here. Pretend I’m a complete idiot and walk me through this deal.” (Osama Bin Laden, Stockpickr, and Everything I know about Negotiation Altucher Confidential)(25 mar 2011)
American techies, Madrigal suggests, are too much in love with the idea of transformative breakthroughs in technique. Energy-system innovation turns out to respond best to decades of steady bearing down on details, which in turn requires steady funding—something the U.S. government is loath to supply. That’s why crude-seeming but nuanced Danish wind turbines from Vestas beat out the “revolutionary” turbines from Kenetech (once valued at $1 billion; bankrupt in 1996).
So I made a CMS which, given a list of words and some explanatory text, would create a downloadable set of 8 bingo cards (great for parents, less great for teachers) on that topic, make a page to pitch that download in, and put an ad for Bingo Card Creator on the page. Note how I’m using this content to upsell the user into more of a relationship with me: signing up for a trial, giving me their email address, maybe eventually buying the software.
I have a teacher in New Mexico who produces the words and descriptions for me. The pages end up looking like this for the American Revolution. She produces 30 activities a month for $100, and I approve them and they go live instantly. This has been going on for a few years. In the last year, I’ve started doing end-to-end conversion tracking, so I can attribute sales directly to the initial activity people started with.
Does anyone have a thought about how large a website’s optimal size should be? 10 pages? A hundred pages? No, in the current environment, the best size for a website is “as large as it possibly can be”, because of how this helps you exploit the long tail. As long as you have a well-designed site architecture and sufficient trust, every marginal topic you cover on your website generates marginal traffic. And if you can outsource or automate this such that the marginal cost of creating a piece of content is less than the marginal revenue received from it, it makes sense to blow your website up.
This is especially powerful if you can make creation of content purely a “Pay money and it happens” endeavor, which lets you treat SEO like a channel like PPC: pour in money, watch sales, laugh all the way to the bank. The difference is that you get to keep your SEO gains forever rather than having to rebuy them on every click like PPC. This is extraordinarily powerful if you do it right. Here’s how:
It is important to mention that links to one bit of content on your site help all other content — perhaps not as much as the linked content, but still substantially. Wikipedia’s article on dolphins doesn’t necessarily have thousands of links pointing to it, but over their millions of articles like the History of the Ottoman empire, they have accumulated trust sufficient that a new page on wiki is assumed to be much better than a new page on a hobbyist’s blog. Note that because Wiki ranks for nearly everything they tend to accumulate new citations when people are looking for someone to cite. This causes a virtuous cycle (for Wiki, anyway): winners win. You’ll see this over and over in SEO.
The economics of a well-designed film subsidy and the economics of suburban shopping malls are identical. State governments offer film subsidies on the theory that film-making within the state will generate ancillary economic activity that will more than offset the cost of the subsidy. Suburban shopping mall developers offer what are effectively rent subsidies to stores they expect to generate extra traffic and sales for the shopping mall. Many of the “anchor stores” — the big, national-brand department stores — at your local mall pay no rent at all, despite occupying vast territories of prime space for which their specialty store neighbors pay dearly. (interfluidity)(24 mar 2011)
Tyrone (who is much more
arrogant and less pleasant than his brother) proclaims this to be his “iron silicon law”:
In (non-terminal) democratic societies, technological
change must always and everywhere be accompanied by the growth of institutions that engender
economic transfers from the relatively few who remain attached to older productive enterprises
to the many who require purchasing power not only to live as they did before, but also to employ one
another in novel or more marginal activities that were not pursued before. Inevitably those institutions develop
in state or quasi-state sectors (which include the state-guaranteed financial sector and
labor unions whose “collective bargaining” rights are enforced by the power of the state).
Tyrone tells me that the only thing the post-Reagan “small government” schtick has accomplished
is to push this process underground, so that covert transfers have been engineered by a “private” financial
sector in ways that are inefficient, nontransparent, and often fraudulent according to traditional laws
and norms. Some of these weak institutions upon which we relied to conduct transfers broke in 2008,
so now we’re really feeling the pain. We’ll continue to feel the pain until we restore the ability of the financial
system to hide widespread transfers, or until we employ some other
sort of institution to provide a sustainable dispersion of purchasing power. (interfluidity» On Tyler Cowen’s “Great Stagnation”)(24 mar 2011)
Cowen seems really focused on the “extensive margin” —
the development of qualitatively new goods. I don’t
think “growth”, in aggregate or as experienced by the
median family, really captures what Cowen thinks we are
missing. Instead, I think that Cowen is lamenting a scarcity
of breathtaking resets. Developments like electrification and the widespread adoption of automobiles
didn’t make people richer as much as they completely changed the circumstances
of everyday life. Indirectly, they also made the production and marketing of
previously extant goods much more efficient: Electricity helped make bread cheaper.
But I don’t think cheap bread impresses Cowen as much as the fact that, post-electricity,
humans colonized the night and Presidents colonized living rooms.
Income statistics do end up capturing these sorts of changes, but in a manner that
is arbitrary and formal. Ultimately, different technological regimes
are incommensurable in welfare terms. (interfluidity» On Tyler Cowen’s “Great Stagnation”)(24 mar 2011)
The urgency of seeing movies the way they’re presumably intended to be seen has given way to the primacy of privacy and the security of knowing that there’s really almost no risk of missing a movie you want to see and never having another opportunity to see it. Put simply, we’d rather stay home, and movies are made for people who’d rather go out.
“Remember when a video didn’t come out until ten months after the movie opened, so you really had to go see it?”
And while that bland assembly-line ethos hasn’t affected the small handful of terrific American movies that reach screens every year, it’s been absolutely devastating for the stuff in the middle—that whole tier of movies that used to reside in quality somewhere below, say, There Will Be Blood but well north of Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too? It’s your run-of-the-mill hey-what’s-playing-tonight movie—the kind of film about which you should be able to say, “That was nothing special, but it was okay”—that has suffered most from Hollywood’s collective inattention/indifference to the basic virtues of story development. If films like The Bounty Hunter and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time define the new “okay,” then the system is, not to put too fine a point on it, in very deep shit. (The Day the Movies Died: Movies + TV: GQ)(24 mar 2011)
Of course, it can miss; can’t-miss movies miss all the time. But when a movie that everyone agrees is pre-sold falls on its face, the dullness of the idea itself never gets the blame. Because the idea that familiarity might actually work against a movie, were it to take hold in Hollywood, would be so annihilating to the studio ecosystem that it would have to be rebuilt from the ground up. Give the people what they don’t know they want yet is a recipe for more terror than Hollywood can accommodate. (The Day the Movies Died: Movies + TV: GQ)(24 mar 2011)
In some ways, the ascent of the marketer was inevitable: Now that would-be blockbusters often open on more than 4,000 screens, the cost of selling a movie has skyrocketed toward—and sometimes past—$40 million to $50 million per film, which is often more than the movie itself cost to make. According to the Los Angeles Times, the studios spent $1 billion just to market the movies that were released in the summer of 2009. “Opening a movie everywhere at once is a very, very expensive proposition,” says Jinks, who points out that ten years ago American Beauty could open slowly and become “ridiculously profitable without ever being the number one movie. But today, if you’re opening, you’re inevitably going to overspend in order to try to buy that first-place finish.” (The Day the Movies Died: Movies + TV: GQ)(24 mar 2011)
Minimize false positives. People stop paying attention very
quickly when the data is incorrect. It’s important to not over-alert or
operations staff will learn to ignore them. This is so important that hiding
real problems as collateral damage is often acceptable. (On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services)(24 mar 2011)
Expect failures. A component may crash or be stopped at any time. Dependent
components might fail or be stopped at any time. There will be network
failures. Disks will run out of space. Handle all failures gracefully.
Keep things simple. Complexity breeds problems. Simple things are easier to
get right. Avoid unnecessary dependencies. Installation should be simple.
ailures on one server should have no impact on the rest of the data center.
Automate everything. People make mistakes. People need sleep. People forget
things. Automated processes are testable, fixable, and therefore ultimately
much more reliable. Automate wherever possible.
Joachim Huffmeier and Guido Hertel tried to figure out why groups magnify individual performance for a study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. They studied relay swim teams in the 2008 Summer Olympics. They found that swimmers on the first legs of a relay did about as well as they did when swimming in individual events. Swimmers on the later legs outperformed their individual event times. In the heat of a competition, it seems, later swimmers feel indispensible to their team’s success and are more motivated than when swimming just for themselves. (Social Science Palooza II - NYTimes.com)(22 mar 2011)
Home teams win more than visiting teams in just about every sport, and the advantage is astoundingly stable over time. So what explains the phenomenon?
It’s not because players perform better when their own fans are cheering them on. In basketball, free-throw percentages are the same home and away. In baseball, a pitcher’s strike-to-ball ratio is the same home and away.
Neither is it the rigors of travel disadvantaging the away team. Teams from the same metro area lose at the same rate as teams from across the country when playing in their rival’s stadium.
No, the real difference is the officiating. The refs and umpires don’t like to get booed. So even if they are not aware of it, they call fewer fouls on home teams in crucial situations. They call more strikes on away batters in tight games in the late innings.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is surrounded by dualism from its first mention. Everything in the garden was allowed, except this tree, which was not-allowed. At the tree we discover the serpent, the first symbolic not-God. The serpent introduces the concept of not-true, which had evidently never before occurred to anyone — something Sorenson demonstrated in his field work among pre-conquest cultures. And upon eating the fruit of the tree, Adam and Eve suddenly perceive others, or not-selves, surrounding them in the garden.
I propose that what was unleashed that day in the garden was, in effect, cognitive binary signal processing: the ontological 0 was born into the human psyche where previously only 1 had ever existed. Suddenly, everything perceivable now has an infinite number of not- counterparts. The horror paleolithic people must have experienced upon stumbling into such an awareness is difficult to fathom. Knowledge of good and evil, indeed.
Consequences
This shattering of the unary whole into infinitude is the basis of what we call information.(22 mar 2011)
The end of the Younger Dryas stadial coincides with the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution in the Tigris-Euphrates river valley. The currently prevailing theory is that as the Younger Dryas took hold in southwest Asia, hunter-foragers were forced into a more settled, horticultural lifestyle in response to thinning animal herds and vegetation upon which they previously depended. When the climate again warmed, this horticultural adaptation blossomed into full-blown agriculture, which subsequently made larger settlements, cities, and eventual empires possible.(22 mar 2011)
re the "michigan v" shirt - you know what you intend to say, but have you thought through the mechanics of the consequences?(22 mar 2011)
"the amazing knack of capitalist white people is turning anything fun into an arduous negotiation of self-definition"(21 mar 2011)
Beginning in 1794 the US congress authorized a daily alcohol ration for sailors. Over time the regulations of alcohol consumption aboard navy vessels changed in various forms until finally on June 1, 1914Josephus Daniels issued General Order 99, which ended all alcohol consumption. (Beer day - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(21 mar 2011)
SR-71s were equipped with two of them, each with a six-inch (152 mm) resolution and the ability to show such details as the painted lines in parking lots from an altitude of 83,000 feet (25,000m).(21 mar 2011)
there's no such thing as american thighs(18 mar 2011)
In the eigenface technique, we start with relatively high-resolution pictures of faces — say 320×240 = 76,800 pixels. We accumulate a collection of such pictures. If these are grey-scale pictures, we can think of each picture as a weighted sum of 76,800 “basis pictures”, each of which has a zero value everywhere except at one of the pixel locations. The coefficients of this weighted sum are then just the picture’s original pixel values, and the sequence of coefficients for a given picture is, by trivial definition, a vector in a 76,800-dimensional space. (This seems like a lot of work for no purpose, but the general approach turns out to be extraordinarily useful.)
We’d like to find a way to project these vectors into a much lower-dimensional subspace, such that as much as possible of the differences among the faces in our collection is preserved. With a bit of linear algebra, we can show that we can do this by choosing, as our new “basis pictures”, the first few eigenvectors of the covariance matrix of our picture collection. Each of these new basis vectors will be a 76,800-dimensional vector, i.e. in this application a sort of a picture, and one of the pictures in our collection (or more important, a new picture) can now be represented as a linear combination (a weighted sum) of these basis vectors.
But these new basis vectors, instead of being blank everywhere but at one pixel location, as our original basis vectors were, have some distribution of non-zero values over the whole picture area, in some cases looking somewhat like fuzzy faces — hence the term “eigenfaces”.
Furthermore, if we order the eigenvectors by the magnitude of the associated eigenvalues, and keep just the first few of them, we can get a perhaps-surprisingly good approximation to the original pictures by adding up a weighted combination of a surprisingly small number of these “eigenfaces” — here say something like 32 or 64 or 128. The weights involved are then a radically smaller representation of each picture — a vector with 128 elements rather than 76,800 elements.
In this new space, it seems that simple measures of similarity between vectors — perhaps as simple as euclidean distance, i.e. the square root of the sum of squared element-wise differences — give us a metric that does a rather good job of identifying faces. We take a new picture, calculate its representation in the “eigenface” space, and then compare it (in that space) to each of the pictures in our collection.(18 mar 2011)
This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships. (OP-ED COLUMNIST - The New Humanism - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com)(18 mar 2011)
Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.
Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.
Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.
Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.
Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.
Starting a startup nowadays is increasingly a collaboration with
the earliest users. You launch something quickly, get a few early
adopters, and build what they want. Those first few customers teach
you what to make, and they also help convince investors to give you
more money. The problem with starting a startup to build things
for schools is that no school districts are early adopters.
re the feeling a programmer might have if she doesn't understand, say, the overflowing of array bounds or the intricacies of memory management, just think: won't those problems look hopelessly primitive to futurtrons in the way that a kludgy manual excel data flow looks to a seasoned abstractionist?(17 mar 2011)
Fourth-generation designs are heavily influenced by lessons learned from the previous generation of combat aircraft. Long-range air-to-air missiles, originally thought to make dogfighting obsolete, proved less influential than expected precipitating a renewed emphasis on maneuverability. Meanwhile, the growing costs of military aircraft in general and the demonstrated success of multi-role aircraft such as the F-4 Phantom II gave rise to the popularity of multi-role fighters in parallel with the advances marking the so-called fourth generation.
What better way for Google to test whether a site is actually decent or not than to rank it quickly because it’s getting traffic, then keep it there or drop it based on the CTR and Bounce Rate of the site?(15 mar 2011)
"the biggest temptation is probably to go all astronaut on your product"(14 mar 2011)
"a keystone of their marriage contract"(14 mar 2011)
Odds are good that you primarily know one sort of person: highly educated, high-achieving, extremely cerebral, etc. Odds are also good that you give too much weight to feedback and ideas from this sort of person, while discounting arguments and complaints from people who don’t know the right way to persuade you. Try to keep that in mind.
2. If the computer is set at 2200 strength, “me plus the computer” (I override it every now and then) almost always beats “the computer alone.” Often we beat “the computer alone” very badly. If the computer is set at full strength, my counsel is worth much less, although it is not valueless.
3. With a computer set at full strength, the useful “team” requires a much stronger human team member than I. The required education level — for the team’s “wage premium” — is ratcheted up.
4. Chess is an area where educational reform has been extremely rapid and extremely successful. Chess education today revolves around learning how to learn from the computer, and this change has come within the last ten to fifteen years. No intermediaries were able to prevent it or slow it down. Humans now teach themselves how to team with computers, and the leading human players have to be very good at this. The computers which most successfully team with humans are those which replicate most rapidly.(14 mar 2011)
Ramachandran: The broken mirror hypothesis and defective theory of mind are complementary. It’s like saying genetics excludes DNA, or something. They complement each other. The broken mirror theory is the one we proposed. We also proposed in the same paper that the salience landscape is defective, due to a derangement of connections between the amygdala and other limbic structures. Normally you assign zero salience to that [points to coffee] - well, it’s tasty, so I assign some salience to it - but not much salience to that [taps the table]. The brain is constructing a salience landscape, and in autism that gets messed up, for some reason. You get trivial things provoking a fight or flight response, so you get the autonomic storms that characterize autism. (Looking into Ramachandran’s broken mirror: Neurophilosophy)(14 mar 2011)
Besides being intuitively plausible, I take (C) to be one of the central claims underlying the Bayes-Net approach to testing causal hypotheses. When we model causation and objective chance in the way specified by Pearl’s and Spirtes et. al.’s causal models, we allow the causal laws codified in the structural equations to induce a probability function over the endogenous variables.(14 mar 2011)
deracinate: Tear (something) up by the roots(14 mar 2011)
The Sullivan nod is a theoretical sales technique used to create a subconscious suggestion to a customer to purchase one particular item out of a list of like items. It is used most frequently by bartenders and waiters when reciting lists of items (such as alcohol or wine) in the hopes of getting the customer to select a particular brand.(14 mar 2011)
Then, after about 40 minutes—the amount of time it takes for water to reach the bladder(14 mar 2011)
Some manufacturers are putting the brakes on new-product introductions. Last year, 69 new toothpastes hit store shelves, down from 102 in 2007, according to market-research firm Mintel International Group. Procter & Gamble Co., maker of Crest, says it has “significantly” reduced the number of oral-care products it makes world wide in the past two years. “We’ve come to realize that fewer is better,” says Matt Doyle, director of global oral-care research and development at P&G.
Stores are trying to simplify, too. Last month, 352 distinct types or sizes of toothpaste were sold at retail, down from 412 in March 2008, according to Spire LLC, which tracks shopping data from more than 30 million U.S. households.
Supervalu Inc., the supermarket giant, has capped the number of package sizes and flavor versions in its stores. “The palate might not be able to discern that sixth variant of mint,” says John Mullaney, Supervalu’s director of personal care.(14 mar 2011)
If people form inferences about decision importance from their own decision efforts, then not only might increased perceived importance lead people to spend more time deciding, but increased decision time might, in turn, validate and amplify these perceptions of importance, which might further increase deliberation time. Thus, one could imagine a recursive loop between deliberation time, difficulty, and perceived importance. Inferences from difficulty may not only impact immediate deliberation, but may kick off a quicksand cycle that leads people to spend more and more time on a decision that initially seemed rather unimportant. Quicksand sucks people in, but the worse it seems the more people struggle.
Their hypothesis is that my wasted deliberation in the drugstore is a metacognitive mistake. Instead of realizing that picking a floss is an easy decision, I confuse the array of options and excess of information with importance, which then leads my brain to conclude that this decision is worth lots of time and attention. Call it the drug store heuristic: A cluttered store shelf leads us to automatically assume that a choice must really matter, even if it doesn’t. (After all, why else would there be so many alternatives?)(14 mar 2011)
vba and ktc and the fear of committed association, or making em mine(13 mar 2011)
Gap know that the more customers who try things on, the more they’ll sell, so they encourage their visitors into changing rooms. They know that by having an assistant on standby with a size up, a size down, and a different colour, they’re more likely to close the sale. They know how attract and aquire customers. (Contrast | The Blog | Designing your sign up page)(10 mar 2011)
copy editing tool that just parses and displays a special kind of diff(10 mar 2011)
think about an ideal tool for copy editing
selecting text and hitting backspace leaves it in place, but dimmed
anchor comments to any selection. highlights (indicating there is a comment). when clicked the comment content appears in an overlay or in the margin
inserted text (i.e., a content-level insertion) has its own color
But as we got deeper into this post, this ordering felt inadequate. A question like Which describes you better, normal or weird? might be fine to ask, but doing so is of little value because almost everyone has the same answer. 79% of people think they are weird. Ironists “rejoice”. (The Best Questions For A First Date «OkTrends)(10 mar 2011)
American- or French-style presidentialism flows organically from a revolutionary context in which the leader of a national liberal movement – Washington or Bolivar, De Gaulle or Walesa – has emerged during a lengthy period of struggle against an authoritarian regime. By the time the movement has gained power, the leader’s selection as president seems the obvious choice to symbolize the achievement of the People over its oppressors. The key question is whether the leader is willing to “constitutionalize his charisma,” and use his reservoir of popular support to stabilize the constitutional regime. If not, a charismatic dictatorship is the likely outcome.(09 mar 2011)
As a far more interesting man [Erdos] than I will ever be liked to say, my brain is open.(09 mar 2011)
The HTML5 history API is a standardized way to manipulate the browser history via script. Part of this API — navigating the history — has been available in previous versions of HTML. The new parts in HTML5 include a way to add entries to the browser history, to visibly change the URL in the browser location bar (without triggering a page refresh), and an event that fires when those entries are removed from the stack by the user pressing the browser’s back button. This means that the URL in the browser location bar can continue to do its job as a unique identifier for the current resource, even in script-heavy applications that don’t ever perform a full page refresh. (History API - Dive Into HTML5)(08 mar 2011)
"I never joined a fraternity. I didn't want a thing to do with fraternities. But I'll tell you what else I never did. I never joined that loose association of counterfraternities, either. That was every bit as much of a club.”(08 mar 2011)
sorkin trying to phonetically recreate the sound of people who know what they're talking about(07 mar 2011)
but it has all the components of a ‘real’ program, input, computation, output.
Don’t forget storage. That was the killer feature that got me hooked. You could write a simple program, store the result (on a disk!), come back later and build upon that result. Before disk storage, computers were toys. After disk storage, they changed the world.
moral progress is about extending the moral circle.
At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity…
Thus, differential sheltering by biological and adoptive parents provides a countervailing force to common rearing…We can also reinterpret this countervailing force…Differential sheltering by biological and adoptive parents implies that, despite being reared apart, adopted twins are in fact subject to a shared environmental influence—namely, adoption itself.(06 mar 2011)
In the late 1990s, a team of neuroscientists at MIT led by Mriganka Sur undertook an audacious experiment: they rewired the brain of a ferret, so that the information from its retina was plugged into its auditory cortex. The assumption was that the animal would be blinded, unable to make sense of all the incoming pixels. To Sur’s astonishment, however, the ferrets could still see. Furthermore, their auditory cortex now resembled the typical ferret visual cortex, complete with spatial maps and neurons tuned to detect certain slants of light. At the time, Michael Merzenich, a leading plasticity researcher at UCSF, called this experiment “The most compelling demonstration you could have that experience shapes the brain.” Our mental hardware wasn’t hard at all.(06 mar 2011)
Suppose you have a right to genetic privacy. You might believe you do. Suppose you have an identical twin. Suppose the identical twin decides to publish his (or her) genetic sequence on the web. Do you have the right to stop this?(03 mar 2011)
The reality is that postural yoga, as we know it in the 21st century, is neither eternal nor synonymous with the Vedas or Yoga Sutras. On the contrary, modern yoga was born in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. It is a child of the Hindu Renaissance and Indian nationalism, in which Western ideas about science, evolution, eugenics, health and physical fitness played as crucial a role as the ‘mother tradition’. In the massive, multi-level hybridisation that took place during this period, the spiritual aspects of yoga and tantra were rationalised, largely along the theosophical ideas of ‘spiritual science,’ introduced to India by the US-origin, India-based Theosophical Society, and internalised by Swami Vivekananda, who led the yoga renaissance.
In turn, the physical aspects of yoga were hybridised with drills, gymnastics and body-building techniques borrowed from Sweden, Denmark, England, the United States and other Western countries. These innovations were creatively grafted on the Yoga Sutras—which has been correctly described by Agehananda Bharati, the Austria-born Hindu monk-mystic, as ‘the yoga canon for people who have accepted Brahmin theology’—to create an impression of 5,000 years worth of continuity where none really exists. The HAF’s current insistence is thus part of a false advertising campaign about yoga’s ancient Brahminical lineage.
When they gathered at that first meeting to hash things out, Jefferson made sure to show up with meticulously prepared architectural drawings, detailed budgets for construction and operation, a proposed curriculum, and the names of specific faculty he wanted to import from Europe. No one else in the room was even remotely as prepared; the group essentially had to capitulate to Jefferson’s vision, and the University was eventually founded more or less in accordance with his plans.
The facts that construction went far over budget, and that many of his ideas did not, for various reasons, work out in the end, were all things Jefferson probably knew perfectly well would happen. His purpose was strategic: to show up at the meeting with something so substantive that everyone else would have to fall into the role of simply proposing modifications to it, so that the overall shape, and therefore schedule, of the project would be roughly as he wanted.
Respirocytes are hypothetical, artificial red blood cells that can supplement or replace the function of much of the human body’s normal respiratory system. Still entirely theoretical, respirocytes would measure 1micrometer in diameter. Respirocytes mimic the action of the natural hemoglobin-filled red blood cells. The design of the spherical nanorobot is made up of 18 billion atoms arranged as a tiny pressure tank. The tank can be filled up with oxygen and carbon dioxide, making one complete transfer point at the lungs, and the reverse transfer at the body’s tissues.
Capitalized Things that have already been snuggled into your semantic network might stand out even more than ordinary phrases.(02 mar 2011)
> SEO is called black magic
One reason it’s called black magic is because it’s a “platform” that appears to be built on shifting sands: Google’s algorithm. Or at least that’s one way of looking at it. The only people who know what goes on with Google are working there and aren’t sharing it. You come across, with your A/B testing and general knowledge, as more of the ‘real thing’, but a lot of those guys seem to be trying to resell the Google webmaster guidelines for high hourly rates
If you’re just the average airline passenger that wants to know why your plane is late, the key to understanding the system is the runways. If you want to be the next Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), you need to understand that the key to the National Airspace System (NAS) is the runways. No matter how complicated all this gets (and it is complicated) everything comes back to the runways.
Step outside and look up into the sky. How many airplanes do you see? How many airplanes do you think we could fit up there? The sky is vast and mostly empty. It is not uncommon to have 5,000 airplanes in the skies over America at any one time. The sky could easily hold a hundred times more. The problem is that they want to get back on the ground. And that takes a runway.
Leonard Nimoy, who played the most famous TV scientist of all time, Mr. Spock, came from an arts and theater background and in real life is nothing like his character. Yet he told me that because Mr. Spock and “Star Trek” have inspired so many young viewers to become scientists, researchers who meet him are always desperate to give him lab tours and explain the projects they’re pursuing in peer-to-peer terms. Mr. Nimoy nods sagely and intones to each one, “Well, it certainly looks like you’re headed in the right direction.” (Natalie Portman, Oscar Winner, Was Also a Precocious Scientist - NYTimes.com)(01 mar 2011)
And so I was trying to find women writers who had had children, and of course the wonderful and terrible and extraordinary thing is that you have to wait until—it’s nothing, nothing, nothing, 1954, nothing, nothing, 1960, and suddenly this flood. So I feel like what’s about to happen, all the young women writers, so many of them have children. And that is so new, it’s such a new thing that’s happening. So we’re going to read books by people who have had children physically, themselves. That’s a new concept in writing, and I’m so curious as to how it’s going to affect literature, because there were so many extraordinary women writers of the twentieth century who, for so many different reasons, didn’t have children. And now it’s beginning to happen, and I’m just excited. I mean in my own experience, it makes you understand time in a way that you never understood it before.(01 mar 2011)
It's just past 11:30am on a Friday and I am enjoying my sixth hour of sleep. I'm in a queen-sized bed. Lying warmly beside me is an attractive, thin—and fairly expensive, I hate to say—personal computer. I left it on last night, and as a result my brain has accidentally mainlined about seven and a half episodes' worth of West Wing dialogue.
Something seems to be whirring and blooping. It sounds urgent, and for a second I think I'm being paged by the White House. This excites me tremendously, but the feeling quickly metastasizes into something closer to crushing disappointment as I come out of my protoconscious haze and realize that I am not, in fact, a speechwriter for President Josiah "Jed" Bartlet, and that I don't even have a pager.(01 mar 2011)
I think certain technical aspects of animated films make it unlikely that any would have (or will in the future) win the big prize. The reason is simple: these movies do not showcase the work of actors, set designers, cinematographers and other artists who make up a large portion of the Academy’s voting membership, and so they lack a strong built-in constituency in the best picture race. (The Critics Tackle Some More Oscar Questions - NYTimes.com)(01 mar 2011)
Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part: The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.(28 feb 2011)
Because when Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their Influence over Men, they supply the Diminution of Beauty by an Augmentation of Utility.(28 feb 2011)
“We need to know,” he said, “whether today was a coincidental series of unavoidable setbacks, or a systemic flaw.”
What utterly delightful phrasing. I plan to borrow this and use it often. No more apologies for total screw-ups from me. I have a much better way to refer to them now.(28 feb 2011)
Starting to realise that the best way to write fictions is as if it wasn’t fiction. That is, how would you tell the story if it were true?
You’re a natural born story teller. It’s literally in your DNA. You do it every day, so you have lots of practice. Tap in to those skills.(27 feb 2011)
among the contemporary things that will one day look hopelessly primitive must surely be… (a) the way we do biology and chemistry (with beakers and shit), (b) the way code is written (by humans by hand in text editors), (c) what we know about the brain, (d) the way we treat cancer(27 feb 2011)
"I'm a simple man. I like pretty dark-haired women and breakfast food."(26 feb 2011)
“see in those days we gave you an appointment for an ass-whooping”(25 feb 2011)
When humans abandoned the zone, he says, it wasn’t just they and their domestic animals—including 135,000 cattle—that left. The “synanthropic” species that live around humans—pigeons, swallows, rats, and the like—also left the territory in large numbers, leaving it free for a wild ecosystem to reestablish itself.
“Structure of entire fauna system change,” Igor says.
ONCE YOU ENTER THE ZONE, the quiet is a shock. It would be eerie were it not so lovely. The abandoned backstreets of Chernobyl are so overgrown, you can hardly see it’s a town. They’ve turned into dark-green tunnels buzzing with bees, filled with an orchestral score of birdsong, the lanes so narrow that the van pushes aside weeds on both sides as it creeps down them, passing house after house enshrined in forest. Red admirals, peacock butterflies, and some velvety brown lepidoptera are fluttering all over the vegetation. It looks like something out of an old Russian fairy tale.
IT WAS SOON AFTER 1A.M. on the night of April 26, 1986, that one of the world’s nightmare scenarios unfolded. Reactor 4 in the huge Chernobyl power station blew up. The causes are still the subject of debate, but it was some combination of a design flaw involving the control rods that regulate reactor power levels, a poorly trained engineering crew, a test that required a power-down of the reactor, and a dogged old-style Soviet boss who refused to believe anything major could be wrong. At any rate, it was spectacular. Eight-hundred-pound cubes of lead were tossed around like popcorn. The 1,000-ton sealing cap was blown clear off the reactor. A stream of raspberry-colored light shone up into the night sky—ionized air, so beautiful that inhabitants of the nearby city of Pripyat came out to stare. When it was all over, estimates former deputy chief engineer Grigori Medvedev, the radioactive release was ten times that of Hiroshima. (Chernobyl Exclusion Zone | outsideonline.com | Readability)(24 feb 2011)
And it’s not just the polymer chemist talking to the semiotician, but people with special expertise acquiring the ability to talk meaningfully to us, meaning ordinary schmoes. Practical examples: Think of the thrill of finding a smart, competent IT technician who can also explain what she’s doing in such a way that you feel like you understand what went wrong with your computer and how you might even fix the problem yourself if it comes up again. Or an oncologist who can communicate clearly and humanly with you and your wife about what the available treatments for her stage-two neoplasm are, and about how the different treatments actually work, and exactly what the plusses and minuses of each one are. If you’re like me, you practically drop and hug the ankles of technical specialists like this, when you find them. As of now, of course, they’re rare. What they have is a particular kind of genius that’s not really part of their specific area of expertise as such areas are usually defined and taught. There’s not really even a good univocal word for this kind of genius—which might be significant. Maybe there should be a word; maybe being able to communicate with people outside one’s area of expertise should be taught, and talked about, and considered as a requirement for genuine expertise.… Anyway, that’s the sort of stuff I think your question is nibbling at the edges of, and it’s interesting as hell. (The Believer - Interview with David Foster Wallace)(24 feb 2011)
and more freighted with all kinds of special context(24 feb 2011)
DFW: The reason why doing political writing is so hard right now is probably also the reason why more young (am I included in the range of this predicate anymore?) fiction writers ought to be doing it. As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O’Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left’s been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it’s totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken’s broadsides but further rage and return-venom?). Or see also e.g. Lapham’s latest Harper’s columns, or most of the stuff in the Nation, or even Rolling Stone. It’s all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds. There’s no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or “dialogue”); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying. Watching O’Reilly v. Franken is watching bloodsport. How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country’s macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy’s outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way—as is the belief that every last person you’re in conflict with is an asshole—but it’s childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community.
My own belief, perhaps starry-eyed, is that since fictionists or literary-type writers are supposed to have some special interest in empathy, in trying to imagine what it’s like to be the other guy, they might have some useful part to play in a political conversation that’s having the problems ours is.
DFW: Here’s an example of a question that’s deeper and more interesting than my response can be. I know that the reason has nothing to do with feeling that a form’s been exhausted. Actually, I don’t understand the whole concept of form and forms very well, nor the various ways different forms and genres get distinguished and classified. Nor do I much care, really. My basic MO is that I tend to start and/or work on a whole lot of different things at the same time, and at a certain point they either come alive (to me) or they don’t. Well over half of them do not, and I lack the discipline/fortitude to work for very long on something that feels dead, so they get abandoned, or put in a trunk, or stripped for parts for other things. It’s all rather chaotic, or feels that way to me. What anybody else ever gets to see of mine, writing-wise, is the product of a kind of Darwinian struggle in which only things that are emphatically alive to me are worth finishing, fixing, editing, copyediting, page-proof-tinkering, etc. (I know you know this drill, and know the soul-fatigue of having to go over your own shit time after time for publication.) And it may be that in order to be really alive for me, a book-length thing has got to be different, feel different, than other stuff I’ve done.… Or, on the other hand, my whole answer here might be hooey: The new book of stories is not all that different, structurally, from GWCH, or from most other story collections. (The Believer - Interview with David Foster Wallace)(24 feb 2011)
Counterpoint to Champion’s demented treble, a low hoarse pulse, then another pulse — Otto the Rot is barking! Bloody great night-shaking woofs and dog-vowels, with his huge upholstered paws crashing against the fence, his claws in their sheaths of leather. And then he’s through, the mottled slats giving way and the rats shrilling in panic as he plunges among them. A joy to watch. Foolish Cocky, imagining that this beast was out of shape! Here’s where nutrition pays off and good sleeping patterns. It’s a right old rampage, cyclonic, with rat-chunks in orbit around his pectorals.
In about ten seconds the garden is clear — just flattened astonished grass, quivering night-molecules and Champion wheezing by the hutch door, which now lolls from one hinge.(23 feb 2011)
The genome data-base is rapidly growing and is available for scientists all over the world to explore. Its origin can be traced to the year 1939, when Shannon wrote his Ph.D. thesis with the title “An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics.”
Shannon was then a graduate student in the mathematics department at MIT. He was only dimly aware of the possible physical embodiment of genetic information. The true physical embodiment of the genome is the double helix structure of DNA molecules, discovered by Francis Crick and James Watson fourteen years later. In 1939 Shannon understood that the basis of genetics must be information, and that the information must be coded in some abstract algebra independent of its physical embodiment. Without any knowledge of the double helix, he could not hope to guess the detailed structure of the genetic code. He could only imagine that in some distant future the genetic information would be decoded and collected in a giant database that would define the total diversity of living creatures. It took only sixty years for his dream to come true.(23 feb 2011)
(on looking in the mirror at night and realizing that your hair, which looks good for like six minutes every day, now looks terrible:) wow, I really shouldn't have had the self-confidence I had today(23 feb 2011)
In Bayesian spam filtering, an e-mail message is modeled as an unordered collection of words selected from one of two probability distributions: one representing spam and one representing legitimate e-mail (“ham”). Imagine that there are two literal bags full of words. One bag is filled with words found in spam messages, and the other bag is filled with words found in legitimate e-mail. While any given word is likely to be found somewhere in both bags, the “spam” bag will contain spam-related words such as “stock”, “Viagra”, and “buy” much more frequently, while the “ham” bag will contain more words related to the user’s friends or workplace.
To classify an e-mail message, the Bayesian spam filter assumes that the message is a pile of words that has been poured out randomly from one of the two bags, and uses Bayesian probability to determine which bag it is more likely to be.
Finally, Consilience, which was published in 1998 and is by the Harvard biologist and twice Pulitzer Prize-winning Edward Wilson. Wilson makes the argument – or rather the prediction – that a lot of the disciplines we have separated human behaviour into are obsolete, and that we are on the verge of unifying knowledge in an inter-disciplinary way. And that’s important because if you look around at various fields, what Wilson predicted a decade ago is actually happening with neuroscience. There’s a field of neural economics, which is a combination of economics and neuroscience, there’s neural this and that, basically neural everything: literary critics, historians. People in many different disciplines are using this work on the brain to illuminate their thinking. And in this way, I think what they’re finding in our unconscious mind will have the same sort of influence that Marx had, and that Sigmund Freud had, namely an entire new vocabulary, that will help define a lot of different fields.(20 feb 2011)
Many animals are social. That’s not hard to explain from an evolutionary point of view. But only a few are ultrasocial. That is, they live together in very large groups of hundreds or thousands, with a massive division of labor, and a willingness to sacrifice for the group. This trick was first discovered over 100 million years ago by the hymenoptera, that is bees, wasps, and ants. But it was discovered completely independently by some cockroaches who became ultrasocial; we now know them as termites. And it was also discovered completely independently by one species of mammal, the naked mole rat. In all of these cases, though, the trick is the same, that is, they are all first degree relatives. They’re all sisters, or sisters and brothers, and they concentrate breeding in a queen. The queen is not the ruler; she’s simply the ovary, and in all of these species it’s one for all, all for one. If they keep the queen alive to reproduce, they reproduce.
There’s just one ultrasocial species on Earth that doesn’t use this trick, and that’s us. We humans qualify as being ultrasocial. We live together in very large groups of hundreds or thousands or millions, with a massive division of labor and a willingness to sacrifice for the group. But how do we do it? What’s our trick? Clearly we don’t suppress breeding and concentrate it in one queen or one breeding couple.
Our trick is very different, Our evolved trick is our ability to forge a team by circling around sacred objects & principles. This is a photograph of Muslims circling the Ka’ba, at Mecca. People of all faiths are brought together by their shared devotion to sacred objects, people, and principles. This ability is crucial in war. And in politics. We’re just really good at binding ourselves together into teams, mostly when we’re competing with other teams.(20 feb 2011)
plat·y·kur·tic
Noun/ˌplatiˈkərtik/
(of a frequency distribution or its graphical representation) Having less kurtosis than the normal distribution
Web definitions
said of a distribution if it has negative kurtosis
The overriding advantage of meat is that demand for it is elastic. People don’t need it but they like it, and up to a point, however much you produce, they’ll keep on buying it. The demand for cereals for human consumption, on the other hand, tends to be inelastic. People need their pound of grain a day, but they don’t need much more, and they won’t buy any more unless they have sufficient wealth to invest the grain in animals, either to produce higher value food, or else to keep it “on the hoof” for a rainy day (or a drought).
The existence of meat means that a farmer can sow wheat, barley, oats, beans, maize, and so on with reasonable confidence that, in the event of a good harvest, someone will buy it, because even if everybody has sufficient, it can be fed to animals. This dynamic is not restricted to a money economy. It works exactly the same for Melanesian subsistence farmers who can sow enough sweet potato and manioc to cover a bad year knowing that it is not a waste of effort, because in a good year the surplus can be fed to pigs.
Take the animals, the elastic element, out of the equation and the business of sowing grain suddenly become far more risky…This elementary matter of the need for a feed buffer fails to feature in most of the literature that is written about meat-eating and vegetarianism…
In his play, Fischer was amazingly objective, long before computers stripped away so many of the dogmas and assumptions humans have used to navigate the game for centuries. Positions that had been long considered inferior were revitalized by Fischer’s ability to look at everything afresh. His concrete methods challenged basic precepts, such as the one that the stronger side should keep attacking the forces on the board. Fischer showed that simplification—the reduction of forces through exchanges—was often the strongest path as long as activity was maintained. The great Cuban José Capablanca had played this way half a century earlier, but Fischer’s modern interpretation of “victory through clarity” was a revelation. His fresh dynamism started a revolution; the period from 1972 to 1975, when Fischer was already in self-exile as a player, was more fruitful in chess evolution than the entire preceding decade.(18 feb 2011)
This is not meant to be a compliment, necessarily. Many strong chess players go on to successful careers as currency and stock traders, so I suppose there is considerable crossover in the pattern-matching and intuitive calculation skills required. But the aptitude for playing chess is nothing more than that. My argument has always been that what you learn from using the skills you have—analyzing your strengths and weaknesses—is far more important. If you can program yourself to learn from your experiences by assiduously reviewing what worked and what did not, and why, success in chess can be very valuable indeed. In this way, the game has taught me a great deal about my own decision-making processes that is applicable in other areas, but that effort has little to do with natural gifts.(18 feb 2011)
The focus is on Bobby and the chess, as it should be, though I was hoping for a little more meat on the topic of the nature of prodigy and Fischer’s early development, beyond his own famous comment “I just got good”—but perhaps there is nothing more. The nature of genius may not be definable. Fischer’s passion for puzzles was combined with endless hours of studying and playing chess. The ability to put in those hours of work is in itself an innate gift. Hard work is a talent.(18 feb 2011)
February 10, 1996: Deep Blue, the IBM chess playing machine, beat Garry Kasparov, who was then the world champion, in the first game of their first match. Kasparov came back to win that match, but his number was up the following year: on May 11, 1997, Deep Blue trounced him in 19 moves to win the second match. Since Kasparov is often considered to be the strongest player ever, this was a major achievement. Deep Blue was massively parallel and used 480 special purpose chips, yet it is believed to have been weaker than a program you can run today on your laptop. For example Rybka, a commercial program, has a projected Elo rating just over 3200 on a dual-core system, while Kasparov’s top rating was 2851. In chess this rating differential means that Kasparov would be fortunate to score 20% versus Rybka.
February 16, 2011: Watson, the IBM question answering machine, beat the two top Jeopardy! champions of all time: Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. A guess or prediction might be: in less than ten years there will be a laptop program that will be even better at answering general knowledge questions than Watson. Actually the program by then might not even need a laptop but will be able to run on some other personal device—will we even have laptops in ten years?
Many documents are linked into the NCSA demo page, which is full of
links leading out into the Web. I scanned down the lines of gray text
and selected a blue link that had nothing to do with my official
mission: “An experiment in hypermedia publishing: excerpts and audio
from a book reading by author Paul Kafka of his novel LOVE
Enter,” it said. This, I hoped, would be a nice breather.
Upon entering the page, I was immediately distracted by another link,
a quiet alcove halfway down that read “poetry archive”. I wanted to see
the poetry archive. I clicked. “Unable to connect to remote host,”
Mosaic responded. I was peeved. The door was locked! I clicked a link
at the bottom of the screen, where the name of the author of the page
was listed: Paul Mende. After a minute of waiting (not unusual),
Mende’s picture appeared. He was smiling and young, with bushy brown
hair and a large mustache. His page listed his research interests:
“String Theory, Quantum Chromdynamics.” Then came a section called
Odds and Ends, under which were listed New Fiction and Readings,
Benjamin’s Home Page, and “local docs.” What were the local docs? Who
was Benjamin?
Before finding out, I glanced at the rest of the document, and it was
then that I began to experience the vertigo of Net travel. On the
lower parts of the page were abstracts of Paul’s scientific papers,
some co-authored with Benjamin Grinstein. “High energy string
collisions in a compact space,” was one of the titles. This meant
nothing to me, of course. But, having sought a respite in poetry, it
was dizzying to have wandered into the company of a physicist.
It was a type of voyeurism, yes, but it was less like peeking into a
person’s window and more like dropping in on a small seminar with a
cloak of invisibility.
One thing it was not like: it was not like being in a library. The
whole experience gave an intense illusion, not of information, but of
personality. I had been treating the ether as a kind of data
repository, and I suddenly found myself in the confines of a
scientist’s study, complete with family pictures.
He pauses to tell a well-known
Microsoft joke: “How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a
light bulb? None, they just declare darkness the standard.”
Based on this open environment, developers around the world are
working on some stunning enhancements to the Web, including better
page-layout techniques; artificial-intelligence search engines; smart,
distributed data-storage methods; and even interactive, Web-based,
virtual reality environments. David Raggett, who is on the technical
staff of Hewlett-Packard’s research labs in Bristol, England, and who
is helping to develop the specifications for the next generation of
Web documents, speaks of how the Web could accommodate the millions of
new users expected to arrive in the coming months. He imagines the
different computers on the Web sharing data in such a way that the
most popular information is replicated onto many machines, while the
least popular information lives on a single machine. Addresses, in the
conventional sense, would disappear. No human being would know where
any specific piece of information was stored. The Web would shift its
data around automatically, while users could retrieve documents simply
by knowing their names. The Web, in this scheme, becomes unlocatable
and omnipresent.
At MIT, a researcher named John Mallery points out how primitive the
Web’s links are today. They are fun, he agreed, but they are not
smart. You can find information on the Web only by drifting through
the links other users have created or by knowing the specific address
of the document. But if documents and parts of documents were
catalogued in more complicated ways, the system itself could build
links. Browsing a magazine on the Web might automatically generate
links to other magazines. Looking at an archive of photographs of
flowers might automatically create links to a botanical database.
“With these kinds of systems,” says Mallery, “the goal is referential
integration. You’ve got all these people, and people are cultural -
the individual has cultural software that he is running. As that
culture is expressed electronically, you can integrate it into the
Web. You can build a knowledge base that can draw on the experience of
not just the individual or a limited group, but a whole country or
planet.” In Mallery’s view, the Web is destined to become not only
omnipresent, but also, in a sense, omniscient.
Two years ago, Andreessen was one of a handful of programmers who were
taking an interest in Tim Berners-Lee’s research on the World Wide
Web. To Andreessen, who says he majored in computer science because
electrical engineering was too much work, the lack of an easy-to-use
graphical interface for the Web was a glaring omission.
“There was this huge hole in the world,” says Andreessen, “because a
network existed with all these people hooked up to it, and the
software was 10 years behind the hardware. This is typical of the
personal computer industry today,” he continues. “Perhaps because of
people like me.” Andreessen argues that people who write software are
often people who, like him, are daunted by building hardware.
Therefore the machines outstrip our capacity to use them.
The secret of Mosaic’s success is no mystery. When you browse with
Mosaic, you see a series of well-proportioned “pages,” with neat
headlines and full-color images. You can fiddle with the screen to
suit your own preferences. (I like grayish-purple text, with links in
blue.) You can mark your progress forward and back in the Web, and
make a “hotlist” of places you visit often. On the Macintosh version,
which I use, you move up and down the page in the conventional
fashion, using a scroll bar on your right.
Mosaic may not be a work of technical genius, but it is hard to stop
using. Every day, interesting new hypermedia documents appear.
Andreessen and other developers claim there are already at least a
million copies of Mosaic on computers around the world.
Long-frustrated dreams of computer liberation - of a universal
library, of instantaneous self-publishing, of electronic documents
smart enough to answer a reader’s questions - are taking advantage of
Mosaic to batter once more at the gates of popular consciousness. This
time, it looks like they might break through. Mosaic is clumsy but
extraordinarily fun. With Mosaic, the online world appears to be a
vast, interconnected universe of information. You can enter at any
point and begin to wander; no Internet addresses or keyboard commands
are necessary. The complex methods of extracting information from the
Net are hidden from sight. Almost every person who uses it feels the
impulse to add some content of his or her own. Since Mosaic first
appeared, according to the NCSA, Net traffic devoted to hypermedia
browsing has increased ten-thousandfold.
The remarkable story latitude inherent in the concept also serves practical considerations by permitting reasonably simple adaptation of stories to fit current studio construction. For example, interiors and exteriors temporarily available after an "Egyptian" motion picture, a "horror" epic, or even an unusual telefilm, could be used to meet the needs of a number of story premises listed here.(17 feb 2011)
One of my best friends was a barista in high school. Over the course of a day, she would make countless subtle adjustments to the espresso being made, to account for everything from the freshness of the beans to the temperature of the machine to the barometric pressure’s effect on the steam volume, meanwhile manipulating the machine with an octopus’s dexterity and bantering with all manner of customers on whatever topics came up. Then she went to college and landed her first “real” job: rigidly procedural data entry. She thought longingly back to her barista days—when her job actually made demands of her intelligence. (Mind vs. Machine - Magazine - The Atlantic)(17 feb 2011)
Once again, the question of what types of human behavior computers can imitate shines light on how we conduct our own, human lives. Verbal abuse is simply less complexthan other forms of conversation. In fact, since reading the papers on MGonz, and transcripts of its conversations, I find myself much more able to constructively manage heated conversations. Aware of the stateless, knee-jerk character of the terse remark I want to blurt out, I recognize that that remark has far more to do with a reflex reaction to the very last sentence of the conversation than with either the issue at hand or the person I’m talking to. All of a sudden, the absurdity and ridiculousness of this kind of escalation become quantitativelyclear, and, contemptuously unwilling to act like a bot, I steer myself toward a more “stateful” response: better living through science.
As Richard Wallace, three-time winner of the Most Human Computer award (’00, ’01, and ’04), explains:
Experience with [Wallace’s chatbot] ALICE indicates that most casual conversation is “state-less,” that is, each reply depends only on the current query, without any knowledge of the history of the conversation required to formulate the reply.
Many human conversations function in this way, and it behooves AI researchers to determine which types of conversation are stateless—with each remark depending only on the last—and try to create these very sorts of interactions. It’s our job as confederates, as humans, to resist them.
One of the classic stateless conversation types is the kind of zany free-associative riffing that Weintraub’s program, PC Therapist III, employed. Another, it turns out, is verbal abuse.
In May 1989, Mark Humphrys, a 21-year-old University College Dublin undergraduate, put online an Eliza-style program he’d written, called “MGonz,” and left the building for the day. A user (screen name “Someone”) at Drake University in Iowa tentatively sent the message “finger” to Humphrys’s account—an early-Internet command that acted as a request for basic information about a user. To Someone’s surprise, a response came back immediately: “cut this cryptic shit speak in full sentences.” This began an argument between Someone and MGonz that lasted almost an hour and a half. (The best part was undoubtedly when Someone said, “you sound like a goddamn robot that repeats everything.”)
Returning to the lab the next morning, Humphrys was stunned to find the log, and felt a strange, ambivalent emotion. His program might have just shown how to pass the Turing Test, he thought—but the evidence was so profane that he was afraid to publish it.
Humphrys’s twist on the Eliza paradigm was to abandon the therapist persona for that of an abusive jerk; when it lacked any clear cue for what to say, MGonz fell back not on therapy clichés like “How does that make you feel?” but on things like “You are obviously an asshole,” or “Ah type something interesting or shut up.” It’s a stroke of genius because, as becomes painfully clear from reading the MGonz transcripts, argument is stateless—that is, unanchored from all context, a kind of Markov chain of riposte, meta-riposte, meta-meta-riposte. Each remark after the first is only about the previous remark. If a program can induce us to sink to this level, of course it can pass the Turing Test.
Once the Daily Doubles are off the board, Watson looks for the lowest clue value in a category, for which there are still a significant number of high value clues. Lower value clues help it get the gist of a category with less risk, so that it has a better shot at the high value clues to come.
how the archimedean method works best when one thinks in chunks, rather than allotted times or minimal touches (a la shilts)… and how to think about chunks? commits and branches and pushes!(16 feb 2011)
some sort of ode to version control that's also a bit of a history, with a particular focus on how it changes the way one thinks and operates, its ubiquity, and how certain features of different version control systems embody various philosophies of productivity and creative work, etc., and all the brilliant thought that’s in there, and the operative metaphors, and the fact that it’s sort of the key infrastructural component in the development of some pretty remarkable and remarkably complex human artifacts, and of course how all this could be elsewhere applied, etc.(16 feb 2011)
This impulse might be worth indulging (briefly), but the problem with Mad Men is that it suffers from a hypocrisy of its own. As the camera glides over Joan’s gigantic bust and hourglass hips, as it languorously follows the swirls of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling, as the clinking of ice in the glass of someone’s midday Canadian Club is lovingly enhanced, you can’t help thinking that the creators of this show are indulging in a kind of dramatic having your cake and eating it, too: even as it invites us to be shocked by what it’s showing us (a scene people love to talk about is one in which a hugely pregnant Betty lights up a cigarette in a car), it keeps eroticizing what it’s showing us, too. For a drama (or book, or whatever) to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering. Here, it cripples the show’s ability to tell us anything of real substance about the world it depicts.(15 feb 2011)
Furthermore, the Massachusetts lottery has a history of dispensing large payouts to suspected criminals, at least in one Mass Millions game. In 1991, James “Whitey” Bulger, a notorious South Boston mob boss currently on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list—he’s thought to be the inspiration for the Frank Costello character in The Departed—and three others cashed in a winning lottery ticket worth $14.3 million. He collected more than $350,000 before his indictment.
At the time, authorities thought Bulger was using the lottery to launder money: take illicit profits, buy a share in a winning lottery ticket, redeem it, and end up with clean cash. In this respect, the lottery system seems purpose-built for organized crime, says Michael Plichta, unit chief of the FBI’s organized crime section. “When I was working in Puerto Rico, I watched all these criminals use traditional lottery games to clean their money,” he remembers. “You’d bring these drug guys in, and you’d ask them where their income came from, how they could afford their mansion even though they didn’t have a job, and they’d produce all these winning lottery tickets. That’s when I began to realize that they were using the games to launder cash.”
There was a time when scratch games all but sold themselves. But in the past two decades the competition for the gambling dollar has dramatically increased. As a result, many state lotteries have redesigned their tickets. One important strategy involves the use of what lottery designers call extended play. Although extended-play games—sometimes referred to as baited hooks—tend to look like miniature spreadsheets, they’ve proven extremely popular with consumers. Instead of just scratching off the latex and immediately discovering a loser, players have to spend time matching up the revealed numbers with the boards. Ticket designers fill the cards with near-misses (two-in-a-row matchups instead of the necessary three) and players spend tantalizing seconds looking for their win. No wonder players get hooked. (Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code | Magazine)(14 feb 2011)
The fact that the majority of the American computing scientists are essentially monolingual, is in this discussion about computing science of special significance. A thorough study of one or more foreign languages makes one much more conscious about one’s own; because an excellent mastery of his native tongue is one of the computing scientist’s most vital assets, I often feel that the American programmer would profit more from learning, say, Latin than from learning yet another programming language.
The great significance of the Buxton Index is not its depth, but its objectivity. The point is that when people with drastically different Buxton Indices have to cooperate while unaware of the concept of the Buxton Index, they tend to make moral accusations against each other. The man with the shorter Buxton Index accuses the other of neglect of duty, the man with the larger one accuses the other of shortsightedness. The notion of the Buxton Index takes the moral flavour away and enables people to discuss such differences among themselves dispassionately. There is nothing wrong with having different Buxton Indices! It takes many people to make a world. There is clearly no moral value attached to either a long or a short Buxton Index. It is a useful concept for dispassionate discussion. (E. W. Dijkstra Archive: On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides. (EWD 611))(14 feb 2011)
A very useful measure is —called after its inventor— the “Buxton Index”. John N. Buxton discovered that the most important one-dimensional scale along which persons are institutions to be compared, can be placed is the length of the period of time in the future for which a person or institution plans. This period, measured in years, gives the Buxton Index. For the little shopkeeper around the corner the Buxton Index is three-quarter, for a true Christian it is infinite, we marry with one near fifty, most larger companies have one of about five, most scientist have one between two and ten. (For a scientist it is hard to have a larger one: the future then becomes so hazy, that effective planning becomes an illusion.) (E. W. Dijkstra Archive: On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides. (EWD 611))(14 feb 2011)
Glymour is certainly not beyond enjoying provocation, but if this is trolling,
it
is Socratic
trolling, the truly desired reaction being thought rather than
outrage.(11 feb 2011)
And then we have to read through hundreds of resumes and cover letters (even though the very fact that we’re hiring means we have a big backlog of other stuff that needs to get done) and pass them around and scratch our heads, trying to figure out who’s the real deal and who’s dead-wood-plus-exaggeration. It’s like trying to pick the best cellphone by comparing the manufacturers’ press releases. (reddit is doubling the size of its programming team: blog)(11 feb 2011)
His essential point is that economic development and technological innovation have reached a plateau, and unfortunately we in America are only now just realizing it: “Political discourse and behavior have become highly polarized, and what I like to call the ‘honest middle’ cannot be heard above the din. People often blame the economic policies of ‘the other side’ or they belligerently snipe at foreign competition. But we are failing to understand why we are failing. All of these problems have a single, little-noticed root cause: We have been living off low-hanging fruit for at least three hundred years. We have built social and economic institutions on the expectation of a lot of low-hanging fruit, but that fruit is mostly gone.”
What does he mean by low-hanging fruit? He lists three major forms — free land, technological breakthroughs (specifically during the 1880-1940 period), and smart, uneducated kids — and two minor ones, cheap fossil fuels and the U.S. Constitution. In other words, these preconditions gave rise to rapid growth and incredible prosperity over the last couple of centuries, but we have now exhausted their dividends. The most obvious measure of this is the stagnation of median household wages in the U.S. for several decades now. “If median income had continued to grow at its earlier postwar rate, the median family income today would be over $90,000,” he notes — about 50% higher than where it currently is.
His proposed solution, “Raise the social status of scientists,”
One should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.(10 feb 2011)
Frankly, I never thought of letters as a career. Writing has always been for me a blend of dejection and high spirits(10 feb 2011)
What does it mean to say that a judge might prefer one rule over another on the basis of the criterion of justication? Let’s continue with our example of the choice between contributory and comparative negligence. Since there is no statute or precedent that compels (or strongly guides) the choice, the judge must turn to some other basis in order to make her decision. She will need to get normative, i.e., to consider the normative justifications for tort law. Simplifying greatly, let’s suppose our judge decides that the tort of negligence is best understood as a system of compensation and “risk spreading.” She might then reason that the comparative negligence rule does a better job of serving this purpose than does a contributory negligence rule. Contributory negligence allows losses to go uncompensated when the plaintiff (victim) caused any of her own loss; comparative negligence does a better job of spreading the risk of accidents. [I know that this is a very crude argument, and I’m sure all of you can do better.]
In other words, the judge asks the question, “What normative theory best justifies the existing law and negligence?” And then proceeds to the question, “Given that justification of tort law, which of the alternative rules that I could apply to the case before me best serves the purposes of tort law?”(10 feb 2011)
What makes corporate taxation special is that dividends paid by corporations to their shareholders are both (1) taxed to the shareholder, and (2) not deductible by the corporation as a cost of doing business. In other words, most of what makes corporate tax different from a plain-vanilla extension of the principles behind personal income tax is that it has an extra tax (“double tax”) on payments to equity investors. Significantly, investors in corporate debt are still taxed on the interest payments they receive, but corporations can take a deduction on these expenses.
So it’s somewhat correct to say that “borrowing decisions are driven by marginal tax rates.” But more importantly, the corporate tax at its core operates as a distortion to how corporations structure their capital. There is a large tax incentive to have a capital structure that is highly leveraged. The strength of this incentive depends not only on marginal corporate income tax rates, but on the relationships between marginal rates for individuals, corporations, capital gains rates, and the rates paid on dividends.(10 feb 2011)
And then there was our annoying way of making players earn continues. This was a major mistake. It makes players that need lives fail while boring players that don’t. It is the opposite of good game balance.
We were already learning. We had realized that if a novice player died a lot of times, we could give them an Aku Aku at the start of a round and they had a better chance to progress. And we figured out that if you died a lot when running from the boulder, we could just slow the boulder down a little each time. If you died too much a fruit crate would suddenly become a continue point. Eventually everyone succeeded at Crash.
Our mantra became help weaker players without changing the game for the better players.
We called all this DDA, Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment, and at the time the extent to which we did it was pretty novel. It would lead later Crash games to be the inclusive, perfectly balanced games they became. Good player, bad player, everyone loved Crash games. They never realized it is because they were all playing a slightly different game, balanced for their specific needs.
The first is that the characters in Crash had different facial expressions on every single frame. Forget bones. I just pulled the vertices until I had what I wanted. It doesn’t sound like a big distinction, but I could go from a huge smile full of teeth to a whistle mouth that was toothless or no mouth at all just by collapsing vertices on top of each other to make zero volume polygons. Thus Crash had a more expressive face than any other character had ever had before, and this created emotion that gamers hadn’t felt before.
It was that opening sequence, when Crash pulls his flat face out of the sand, shakes it off, looks confused, leaps up, looks at the camera and does his great big goofy smile that SOLD Crash as a character. No 2d game could afford the art, and no other 3d game had the facial animation that our vertex system brought. And thus the main character transformed from emotionless “vehicles” to an emotive friend.
what is this mood? it's about the way I'm seeing what I'm seeing, as crucial and human and connected to some secret the substance of which sits wonderfully unarticulated in the happy shadows of my mind.(10 feb 2011)
sesqui-
Combining form
Denoting one and a half
sesquicentenary
(of a compound) In which a particular element or group is present in a ratio of 3:2 compared with another
it's cool when a word has two senses and you can use both of them at the same time… like what?… I just wiped the shit out of my ass(08 feb 2011)
game that accepts arbitrary sporcle quizzes as input and spits out a race(08 feb 2011)
please don't misunderstand my impatience(08 feb 2011)
Some insects produce sperm that look like discs, with no tails at all. The bird sperm I study have augur-shaped heads and helix-shaped tails. Fruit flies, just two or three millimetres long, have sperm that stretch up to ten centimetres because they are in rolls like balls of thread. That’s phenomenal. (Tim Birkhead on Sperm | FiveBooks | The Browser)(07 feb 2011)
pre·scind
Verb/priˈsind/
prescinds
3rd person singular present; prescinded
past participle; prescinding
present participle; prescinded
past tense
Leave out of consideration
we have prescinded from many vexing issues
Cut off or separate from something
his is an idea entirely prescinded from all of the others
Overheard: I’m a liberal, but everyone from Ann Arbor can go fuck themselves.(05 feb 2011)
In the past you had these gigantic arms that were rotely obeying their instructions and if, God forbid, you stepped in front of one of these guys, it would arc weld your face, just as soon as it would arc weld the side of the car. Now what’s happened is that these manipulators are getting more and more people friendly, they’re getting smarter. They’re starting to get sensors so they can see what they’re doing, they can make some decisions about how to do what they’re doing. They’re not just these blind slave arms that are just going about replaying the same commands again and again. So even the robot arms are getting smarter.
And the fact is that none of the products we have would cost what they cost if there weren’t these factories filled with robots. There’s no human being that can assemble a hard drive. No human being can assemble an iPod, much less all the components that go into the iPod. All the stuff that we own has robot fingerprints all over it, whether you know it or not – whether it came from China or whether it’s domestic. (Daniel H Wilson on Robotics | FiveBooks | The Browser)(02 feb 2011)
The story is primarily concerned with, ‘How do you tell a human from a robot?’ But what I found most interesting about it was that it was an apocalyptic future, in which human beings had built machines not to kill other human beings, but to learn how to kill other human beings. The robots initially were just landmines, they were very simple things. They learned how to camouflage themselves, and then human beings became more scarce and smarter, so the robots actually had to begin to learn how to mimic us. What’s interesting to me from a roboticist’s perspective is that it’s just a problem like any other – killing people. You can program a machine to learn how to do that optimally. What’s really fascinating is that the optimal form that this robot has chosen to kill human beings is another human being. That’s just a really, really cool concept to me; it’s a powerful message. (Daniel H Wilson on Robotics | FiveBooks | The Browser)(02 feb 2011)
allocentric ~= empathetic, cf. egocentric(02 feb 2011)
Ramachandran, who is 59, is known for what his critics see as sophomoric humour. In The Tell-Tale Brain, he recounts the neurological case of a man who saw a different woman each time he looked at his wife. “We should all be so lucky,” quipped Ramachandran when speaking to the man’s lawyer on the phone.(02 feb 2011)
how the way to combat a small static charge is to slap the object(02 feb 2011)
In semiconductors and insulators, electrons are confined to a number of bands of energy, and forbidden from other regions. The term “band gap” refers to the energy difference between the top of the valence band and the bottom of the conduction band. Electrons are able to jump from one band to another. However, in order for an electron to jump from a valence band to a conduction band, it requires a specific minimum amount of energy for the transition. The required energy differs with different materials. Electrons can gain enough energy to jump to the conduction band by absorbing either a phonon (heat) or a photon (light).
A semiconductor is a material with a small but nonzero band gap which behaves as an insulator at absolute zero but allows thermal excitation of electrons into its conduction band at temperatures which are below its melting point. In contrast, a material with a large band gap is an insulator. In conductors, the valence and conduction bands may overlap, so they may not have a band gap.
As Paul Harding, who won last year’s Pulitzer for his own peripatetic sentences in his novel Tinkers, puts it: “The criteria for caloric prose is that it be nutritious. Getting at essence isn’t always a matter of stripping away length. That’s part of the modernist myth of de-mythification.”(01 feb 2011)
The trouble with the book isn’t the rules themselves, which the authors are sage enough to recognise “the best writers sometimes disregard”, but the knock-on effect that their bias for plain statement has tended to have not only on expositional but literary prose2. In this, admittedly, Strunk & White had a few assists, in particular Hemingway. If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.(01 feb 2011)
e·ti·o·lat·ed
Adjective/ˈētēəˌlātid/
(of a plant) Pale and drawn out due to a lack of light
the way cab drivers converse on the phone, compared to n's phone manner(31 jan 2011)
This is a new book that argues that the Ottoman Empire had a maritime interest in the Indian Ocean which we have underrated.(31 jan 2011)
That’s not because there was something fundamentally rotten at the core of philosophical anti-foundationalism (whose leading American exponent, Richard Rorty, remained a progressive Democrat all his life), but it might very well have had something to do with the cloistered nature of the academic left. It was as if we had tacitly assumed, all along, that we were speaking only to one another, so that whenever we championed Jean-François Lyotard’s defense of the “hetereogeneity of language games” and spat on Jürgen Habermas’s ideal of a conversation oriented toward “consensus,” we assumed a strong consensus among us that anyone on the side of heterogeneity was on the side of the angels.
But now the climate-change deniers and the young-Earth creationists are coming after the natural scientists, just as I predicted–and they’re using some of the very arguments developed by an academic left that thought it was speaking only to people of like mind. Some standard left arguments, combined with the left-populist distrust of “experts” and “professionals” and assorted high-and-mighty muckety-mucks who think they’re the boss of us, were fashioned by the right into a powerful device for delegitimating scientific research.
It was there that I first unveiled my counterargument, namely, that the world really is divvied up into “brute fact” and “social fact,” just as philosopher John Searle says it is, but the distinction between brute fact and social fact is itself a social fact, not a brute fact, which is why the history of science is so interesting. (Michael Bérubé for Democracy Journal: The Science Wars Redux)(31 jan 2011)
This is a topic very interesting to me, because over the years I’ve written a lot of call center and customer service software used by distributed teams. I also worked as a developer remotely for Linden Lab for long time, which had a highly distributed workforce, using Second Life and other things as a primary interaction platform. There are things I’ve observed when writing software used by distributed teams that make a huge measurable difference in productivity.
When working remote, it’s easier to feel like it doesn’t really matter if you put your nose to the grindstone, since nobody can tell. So I found it made a dramatic difference in productivity when I implemented a simple sidebar that showed what ticket each member was working on, and how long they’d been working on it. It was intended to be sort of like an office: in an office, when you see your team members working away, it’s a little more emotionally difficult to take time off to surf your favorite website or something.
For customer service, video game mechanics help a lot: completing each ticket gets you closer to your goal. Keeping quality metrics up gives you a visible indication that you’re a good person. It’s not easy to implement and sell these kinds of features, but it’s also not easy to keep people motivated (whether they’re remote or not).
Scrum and frequent voice communication help a lot as well. There are downsides to distributed teams, but there are big upsides, as well. Distributed teams, while not perfect, have many benefits. The key to making it work, as with so many things, is to figure out ways to make everyone care and want to do their best. In absence of that vital culture of giving a shit, even a team that’s co-located together is not going to do well. In my experience, that culture of excellence is even more important than being in the same place.
I spent some time working in the television industry, and I learned a technique that writers use. It’s called “the bad version.” When you feel that a plot solution exists, but you can’t yet imagine it, you describe instead a bad version that has no purpose other than stimulating the other writers to imagine a better version.
“With regard to the quality of research, we tend to evaluate faculty the way the Michelin guide evaluates restaurants,” Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently noted. “We ask, ‘How high is the quality of this cuisine relative to the genre of food? How excellent is it?’ With regard to teaching, the evaluation is done more in the style of the Board of Health. The question is, ‘Is it safe to eat here?’”
Crosswordese is a term generally used to describe words frequently found in crossword puzzles but seldom found in everyday conversation. They are usually short words, three to five letters, with letter combinations which crossword constructors find useful in the creation of crossword puzzles. This is frequently because short words that start with a vowel are needed in every puzzle to some extent. Too much crosswordese in a crossword puzzle is considered a negative thing by cruciverbalists, or crossword enthusiasts.
Indeed, words themselves are paradigms or stable “species” of sorts that evolve gradually with progressively accumulating penumbras of meaning, or sometimes mutate into new words to denote new concepts. These can then consolidate into chunks with “handles” (names) for juggling ideas around generating novel combinations. As a behavioral neurologist I am tempted to suggest that such crystallization of words and juggling them is unique to humans and it occurs in brain areas in and near the left TPO (temporal-parietal-occipital junction). But that’s pure speculation.
Paraplegics are often unhappy, but they are not unhappy all the time because they spend most of the time experiencing and thinking about other things than their disability. When we think of what it is like to be a paraplegic, or blind, or a lottery winner, or a resident of California we focus on the distinctive aspects of each of these conditions. The mismatch in the allocation of attention between thinking about a life condition and actually living it is the cause of the focusing illusion.
In one of the great examples of this, it was for quite some time thought that when chickens hatched and they immediately began pecking the ground for food, this behavior must have been instinctive. In the 1920s a Chinese researcher named Zing-Yang Kuo made a remarkable set of observations on the developing chick egg that overturned this idea — and many similar ones. Using a technique of elegant simplicity he found that rubbing heated Vaseline on a chicken egg caused it to become transparent enough to see the embryo inside without disturbing it. In this way he was able to make detailed observations of the development of the embryo from fertilization to hatching. One of his observations was that, in order for the growing embryo to fit properly in the egg, the neck is bent over the chest of the body in such a way that the head rests upon the chest just where the developing heart is encased. As the heart begins beating the head of the chicken is moved in an up-and-down manner that precisely mimics the movement that will be used later for pecking the ground. Thus the “innate” pecking behavior that the chicken appears to know miraculously upon birth has, in fact, been practiced for more than a week within the egg. (THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011— Page 15)(28 jan 2011)
In sensory perception, multi-sensory integration is the rule not the exception. In audition, we don’t just hear with our ears, we use our eyes to locate the apparent sources of sounds in the cinema where we “hear” the voices coming from the actors’ mouths on the screen although the sounds are coming from the sides of the theatre. This is known as the ventriloquism effect. Similarly, retronasal odours detected by olfactory receptors in the nose are experienced as tastes in the mouth. The sensations get re-located to the mouth because oral sensations of chewing or swallowing capture our attention, making us think these olfactory experiences are occurring in the same place.
And it doesn’t stop here. There is good reason to think that we have two senses of smell: an external sense of smell, orthonasal olfaction, produced by inhaling, that enables us to detect things in the environment such food, predators or smoke; and internal sense, retronasal olfaction, produced by exhaling, that enables us to detect the quality of what we have just eaten, allowing us to decide whether we want any more or should expel it.
Associated with each sense of smell is a distinct hedonic response. Orthonasal olfaction gives rise to the pleasure of anticipation. Retronasal olfaction gives rise to the pleasure of reward. Anticipation is not always matched by reward. Have you ever noticed how the enticing aromas of freshly brewed coffee are never quite matched by the taste? There is always a little disappointment. Interestingly, the one food where the intensity of orthonsally and retronasally judged aromas match perfectly is chocolate. We get just what we expected, which may explain why chocolate is such a powerful stimulus.
For a given metabolic pathway used by life, e.g. reacting carbohydrates with oxygen, we can measure how many Joules are available to do work per mole of reactants. Humans and essentially all the animals you know and love typically harness a couple thousand kiloJoules per mole by burning food with oxygen. Microbes have figured out all sorts of ways to harness the Gibbs free energy by combining various gases, liquids, and rocks. Measurements by Tori Hoehler and colleagues at NASA Ames Research Center on methane-generating and sulfate-eating microbes indicate that the limit for life may be about 10 kiloJoules per mole. Within a given environment there may be many chemical pathways in operation and if there is an open energetic niche, chances are life will find a way to fill it. Biological ecosystems can be mapped as a landscape of reactions and pathways for harnessing energy; this is the Gibbs landscape. (THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011— Page 15)(28 jan 2011)
five guys rippin it,"up, down, up, down," coxswain yelling in the background(27 jan 2011)
uppers, downers, lefters, righters, ski lifts, rollouts, tuck-ins(27 jan 2011)
am I more likely to be upset and arguing when I'm wrong? (and thus can I take the fact that I’m upset and arguing as evidence that I’m wrong?)(27 jan 2011)
Our unawareness of the limits of our umwelt can be seen with color blind people: until they learn that others can see hues they cannot, the thought of extra colors does not hit their radar screen. And the same goes for the congenitally blind: being sightless is not like experiencing “blackness” or “a dark hole” where vision should be. As a human is to a bloodhound dog, a blind person does not miss vision. They do not conceive of it. Electromagnetic radiation is simply not part of their umwelt.
The antidote to “nature versus nurture” thinking is to recognize the existence, and importance, of “instincts to learn”. This phrase was introduced by Peter Marler, one of the fathers of birdsong research. A young songbird, while still in the nest, eagerly listens to adults of its own species sing. Months later, having fledged, it begins singing itself, and shapes its own initial sonic gropings to the template provided by those stored memories. During this period of “subsong” the bird gradually refines and perfects its own song, until by adulthood it is ready to defend a territory and attract mates with its own, perhaps unique, species-typical song.
Songbird vocal learning is the classic example of an instinct to learn. The songbird’s drive to listen, and to sing, and to shape its song to that which it heard, is all instinctive. The bird needs no tutelage, nor feedback from its parents, to go through these stages. Nonetheless, the actual song that it sings is learned, passed culturally from generation to generation. Birds have local dialects, varying randomly from region to region. If the young bird hears no song, it will produce only an impoverished squawking, not a typical song.
Floyd G. Paxton (died December 101975[1]) is the inventor of the bread clip, a notched plastic tag used for sealing bags of bread worldwide[2]. It is manufactured by the Kwik Lok corporation, and part of the proceeds for each clip go to the John Birch Society[citation needed], of which Paxton was a director and past President. Floyd Paxton was known for repeatedly telling the story about how he came up with the idea of the bread clip. As he told it, he was on an airline and opened a bag of peanuts and then realized he had no way to close up the bag. He rummaged through his wallet and found an expired credit card and hand-carved his first bag clip with his small pen knife. Of course, this was many decades ago when one could carry a pen knife onto an airplane. When a fruit packer, Pacific Fruit, wanted a to replace rubber bands with a better bag closure for it new plastic bags, Paxton remembered his bag of peanuts. He hand-whittled another clip from a small sheet of plexiglass. With an order in hand for a million clips, Paxton designed a die-cut machine to produce the clips at high speed. Despite repeated attempts, Paxton never won a U.S. Patent for his clips. He did win numerous patents for the high-speed “bag closing apparatus” that made the clips, inserted bread into bags and applied the clips for the finished product. (Floyd Paxton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(26 jan 2011)
the worst part in the lifecycle of liquid soap is when there's still a usable amount left, but the level is so low that the pump no longer works.(26 jan 2011)
Better instead to have one’s nose and what lies beyond shift out of focus — to make oneself hysterically blind as convenience dictates, rather than to risk ending up like Oedipus, literally blinding oneself in horror at the harvest of an exhausting, successful struggle to discover what is true. (THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011 — Page 12)(26 jan 2011)
Instead, Mischel discovered something interesting when he studied the tiny percentage of kids who could successfully wait for the second treat. Without exception, these “high delayers” all relied on the same mental strategy: they found a way to keep themselves from thinking about the treat, directing their gaze away from the yummy marshmallow. Some covered their eyes or played hide-and-seek underneath the desk. Others sang songs from “Sesame Street,” or repeatedly tied their shoelaces, or pretended to take a nap. Their desire wasn’t defeated — it was merely forgotten.
Mischel refers to this skill as the “strategic allocation of attention,” and he argues that it’s the skill underlying self-control. Too often, we assume that willpower is about having strong moral fiber. But that’s wrong — willpower is really about properly directing the spotlight of attention, learning how to control that short list of thoughts in working memory. It’s about realizing that if we’re thinking about the marshmallow we’re going to eat it, which is why we need to look away.
Kakonomics is the strange — yet widespread — preference for mediocre exchanges insofar as nobody complains about. Kakonomic worlds are worlds in which people not only live with each other’s laxness, but expect it: I trust you not to keep your promises in full because I want to be free not to keep mine and not to feel bad about it. What makes it an interesting and weird case is that, in all kakonomic exchanges, the two parties seem to have a double deal: an official pact in which both declare their intention to exchange at a High-quality level, and a tacit accord whereby discounts are not only allowed but expected. It becomes a form of tacit mutual connivance. Thus, nobody is free-riding: Kakonomics is regulated by a tacit social norm of discount on quality, a mutual acceptance for a mediocre outcome that satisfies both parties, as long as they go on saying publicly that the exchange is in fact at a High-quality level. (THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011 — Page 10)(26 jan 2011)
In principle there should be no limit to the diversity of supernatural beings humans can imagine. However, as Pascal Boyer has argued, only a limited repertoire of such beings is exploited in human religions. Its members — ghosts, gods, ancestor spirits, dragons, and so on — have all in common two features. On the one hand, they each violate some major intuitive expectations about living beings: expectation of mortality, of belonging to one and only one species, of being limited in one’s access to information, and so on. On the other hand, they satisfy all other intuitive expectations and are therefore, in spite of their supernaturalness, rather predictable. Why should this be so? Because being “minimally counterintuitive” (Boyer’s phrase) makes for “relevant mysteries” (my phrase) and is a cultural attractor. Imaginary beings that are either less or more counterintuitive than that are forgotten or are transformed in the direction of this attractor. (THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011 — Page 10)(26 jan 2011)
you could walk in the British countryside now and hear only a fraction of the birdsong that would have delighted a Victorian poet but we simply cannot feel insidious loss. Only a present crisis wakes us. (THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011 — Page 10)(26 jan 2011)
"girl I wantchyo beefy glutes [uptick a la rubber ducky's 'you're the one'] in my face"(25 jan 2011)
But there is still a long way to go. Studies indicate that most patients want to believe in their doctors’ omniscience and don’t dare to ask for backing evidence, yet nevertheless feel well-informed after consultations. Similarly, even after the banking crisis, many customers still blindly trust their financial advisors, jeopardizing their fortune in a consultation that takes less time than they’d spend watching a football game. (THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011 — Page 8)(24 jan 2011)
In fact, scale analysis in its simplest form can be applied to almost every quantitative aspect of daily life, from the fundamental timescales governing our expectations on returns on investments, to the energy intensity of our lives. Ultimately, scale analysis is a particular form of numeracy — one where the relative magnitude, as well as the dimensions of things that surround us, guide our understanding of their meaning and evolution. It almost has the universality and coherence of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas: a unifying system of classification, where distant relations between seemingly disparate objects can continuously generate new ways of looking at problems and, through simile and dimension, can often reveal unexpected avenues of investigation. (THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011 — Page 7)(24 jan 2011)
Darwinian evolutionary biology is the prototype for thinking in time because at its heart is the realization that natural processes developing in time can lead to the creation of genuinely novel structures. Even novel laws can emerge when the structures to which they apply come to exist. Evolutionary dynamics has no need of abstract and vast spaces like all the possible viable animals, DNA sequences, sets of proteins, or biological laws. Exaptations are too unpredictable and too dependent on the whole suite of living creatures to be analyzed and coded into properties of DNA sequences. Better, as Stuart Kauffman proposes, to think of evolutionary dynamics as the exploration, in time, by the biosphere, of the adjacent possible.
The difference between shallow and deep copying is only relevant for compound
objects (objects that contain other objects, like lists or class instances):
A shallow copy constructs a new compound object and then (to the extent
possible) inserts references into it to the objects found in the original.
A deep copy constructs a new compound object and then, recursively, inserts
copies into it of the objects found in the original.
The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto undertook a study of market economies a century ago, and discovered that no matter what the country, the richest quintile of the population controlled most of the wealth. The effects of this Pareto Distribution go by many names — the 80/20 Rule, Zipfs Law, the Power Law distribution, Winner-Take-All — but the basic shape of the underlying distribution is always the same: the richest or busiest or most connected participants in a system will account for much much more wealth, or activity, or connectedness than average.
Furthermore, this pattern is recursive. Within the top 20% of a system that exhibits a Pareto distribution, the top 20% of that slice will also account for disproportionately more of whatever is being measured, and so on. The most highly ranked element of such a system will be much more highly weighted than even the #2 item in the same chart. (The word “the” is not only the commonest word in English, it appears twice as often the second most common, “of”.)
This pattern was so common, Pareto called it a “predictable imbalance”; despite this bit of century-old optimism, however, we are still failing to predict it, even though it is everywhere. (THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011 — Page 6)(23 jan 2011)
Building on Hölldobler and Wilson’s work on insect societies, we can define a “contingent superorganism” as a group of people that form a functional unit in which each is willing to sacrifice for the good of the group in order to surmount a challenge or threat, usually from another contingent superorganism. It is the most noble and the most terrifying human ability. It is the secret of successful hive-like organizations, from the hierarchical corporations of the 1950s to the more fluid dot-coms of today. It is the purpose of basic training in the military. It is the reward that makes people want to join fraternities, fire departments, and rock bands. It is the dream of fascism.
But in the last few years there’s been a growing acceptance of the fact that “Life is a self-replicating hierarchy of levels,” and natural selection operates on multiple levels simultaneously, as Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson put it in their recent book, The Superorganism. Whenever the free-rider problem is solved at one level of the hierarchy, such that individual agents can link their fortunes and live or die as a group, a superorganism is formed. Such “major transitions” are rare in the history of life, but when they have happened, the resulting superorganisms have been wildly successful. (Eukaryotic cells, multicelled organisms, and ant colonies are all examples of such transitions).
Likewise, soft technologies from central currency to psychotherapy are biased in their construction as much as their implementation. No matter how we spend US dollars, we are nonetheless fortifying banking and the centralization of capital. Put a psychotherapist on his own couch and a patient in the chair, and the therapist will begin to exhibit treatable pathologies. It’s set up that way (THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011 — Page 5)(22 jan 2011)
For example, in my own work in physics I’ve noticed many times the impact of inventing names for things. When Murray Gell-Mann invented “quarks”, he was giving a name to a paradoxical pattern of facts. Once that pattern was recognized, physicists faced the challenge of refining it into something mathematically precise and consistent; but identifying the problem was the crucial step toward solving it! Similar, when I invented “anyons” I knew I had put my finger on a coherent set of ideas, but I hardly anticipated how wonderfully those ideas would evolve and be embodied in reality. In cases like this, names create new nodes in hidden layers of thought. (THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011 — Page 5)(22 jan 2011)
A second is an arbitrary time unit, but one that is based on our experience. Our visual system is bombarded by snapshots at a rate of around 3 per second caused by rapid eye movements called saccades. Athletes often win or lose a race by a fraction of a second. If you earned a dollar for every second in your life you would be a billionaire. However, a second can feel like a minute in front of an audience and a quiet weekend can disappear in a flash. As a child, a summer seemed to last forever, but as an adult, summer is over almost before it begins. William James speculated that subjective time was measured in novel experiences, which become rarer as you get older. Perhaps life is lived on a logarithmic time scale, compressed toward the end.
JAMES O’DONNELL Classicist; Provost, Georgetown University; Author, The Ruin of the Roman Empire
Everything Is In Motion
Nothing is more wonderful about human beings than their ability to abstract, infer, calculate, and produce rules, algorithms, and tables that enable them to work marvels. We are the only species that could even imagine taking on mother nature in a fight for control of the world. We may well lose that fight, but it's an amazing spectacle nonetheless.
But nothing is less wonderful about human beings than their ability to refuse to learn from their own discoveries. The edge to the Edge question this year is the implication that we are brilliant and stupid at the same time, capable of inventing wonders and still capable of forgetting what we've done and blundering stupidly on. Our poor cognitive toolkits are always missing a screwdriver when we need it and we're always trying to get a bolt off that wheel with our teeth when a perfectly serviceable wrench is in the kit over there unused.
So as classicist, I'll make my pitch for what is arguably the oldest of our "SHA" concepts, the one that goes back to the senior pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus."You can't step in the same river twice," he said; putting it another way his mantra was "Everything flows." Remembering that everything is in motion — feverish, ceaseless, unbelievably rapid motion — is always hard for us. Vast galaxies dash apart at speeds that seem faster than is physically possible, while the subatomic particles of which we are composed beggar our ability to comprehend large numbers when we try to understand their motion — and at the same time, I lie here, sluglike, inert, trying to muster the energy to change channels, convinced that one day is just like another, reflecting on the deep truth that my idiot cousin will never change, and wondering why my favorite cupcake store has lost its magic touch.
Because we think and move at human scale in time and space, we can deceive ourselves. Pre-Copernican astronomies depended on the self-evident fact that the "fixed stars" orbited around the other in a slow annual dance; and it was an advance in science to declare that "atoms" (in Greek, literally "indivisibles") were the changeless building blocks of matter — until we split them. Edward Gibbon could be puzzled by the fall of the Roman Empire without realizing that its most amazing feature was that it lasted so long. Scientists discover magic disease-fighting compounds only to find that the disease changes faster than they can keep up.
Take it from Heraclitus and put it in your toolkit: change is the law, stability and consistency are illusions, temporary in any case, a heroic achievement of human will and persistence at best. When we want things to stay the same, we'll always wind up playing catch-up. Better to go with the flow.
In one College Board survey of 829,000 high school seniors, zero percent rated themselves below average in “ability to get along with others,” 60 percent rated themselves in the top 10 percent, and 25 percent rated themselves in the top 1 percent. (THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011 — Page 4)(21 jan 2011)
Even the crudest of online porn captures only a slice of the less-than-uplifting aspects of the sexual experience, because porn not only eschews but actively conceals this singular truth: the most brutalizing aspects of sex are not physical. This is made plain by the great, filthy, but far from pornographic Last Tango in Paris, which Pauline Kael described as the “most powerfully erotic movie ever made.” In Bernardo Bertolucci’s story, Paul, played by an age-ravaged but still sexually menacing Marlon Brando, decides to rent a flat in an attempt to escape his grief over his wife’s recent suicide. When Paul goes to look at an empty apartment, he meets Jeanne, a petite 20-year-old bride-to-be who is also searching for an apartment. The two have sex without even knowing each other’s names, and this begins their four-day encounter.
Paul insists that the two meet only at the apartment, only have sex, and say nothing about their lives. Jeanne halfheartedly accepts (she constantly comes up against Paul’s rules, begging for more details about him and offering unsolicited morsels about her life). Paul works out his grief by debasing himself and her. “He demands total subservience to his sexual wishes,” Kael writes. “This enslavement is for him the sexual truth, the real thing, sex without phoniness.” In one scene, Paul asks Jeanne if she would be willing to eat vomit as proof of her love for him. Adoringly, she says yes. Jeanne experiences the full brunt of Paul’s sexual aggression and violence when, while she attempts to resist, Paul pulls down her jeans, pins her to the floor, and has rough anal sex with her, using butter as a lubricant.
Jeanne accepts all of Paul’s manic pronouncements, sexual roughhousing, and torment, either because of her own naïveté or, perhaps, as a response to Paul’s authentic desperation. When Paul’s wife’s body is finally ready for burial, he gives up the apartment and tells Jeanne that he wants to know her name and he is ready to love her. As the picture of Paul comes more sharply into focus, Jeanne ultimately rejects him not because of his brutishness, but because of his banality. Paul is a morose wash-up, a widower in his 40s who runs a flophouse. His excessive masculinity quickly withers when exposed to the air outside the barren flat.
What makes Last Tango so devastating and resonant is not the sex acts, for which the movie is often remembered, but rather the common but annihilating emotions that fuel them: desperation and loneliness. It’s the clash between vulnerability and indifference that transpires after sex that is so savage. This is what Kael called “realism with the terror of actual experience.” The most frightening truths about sex rarely exist in the physical, but instead live in the intangible yet indelible wounds created in the psyche. Go try to find that on the Internet.
Never was this made plainer to me than during a one-night stand with a man I had actually known for quite a while. A polite, educated fellow with a beautiful Lower East Side apartment invited me to a perfunctory dinner right after his long-term girlfriend had left him. We quickly progressed to his bed, and things did not go well. He couldn’t stay aroused. Over the course of the tryst, I trotted out every parlor trick and sexual persona I knew. I was coquettish then submissive, vocal then silent, aggressive then downright commandeering; in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it’s a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, “Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable.”
This was, perhaps, the greatest moment of sexual honesty I’ve ever experienced—and without hesitation, I complied.
In 1995 fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly coined a phrase for this troubling ecological obliviousness — he called it “shifting baseline syndrome”. Here is how Pauly first described the syndrome: “Each generation of fisheries scientist accepts as baseline the stock situation that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species…”(20 jan 2011)
When I was 12-13, I was very interested in chess and not so interested in culturally sophisticated outputs, unless you count the Beatles and jazz guitar and baseball. I am glad that I spent most of my time then reading in those areas because I cared about them deeply at the time. Those investments will then help us learn other areas, so it is learning about how to learn. At age 21 it was all about German Romanticism for me, and at 22 analytic philosophy. Find grooves, and push on them until your ardor abates.(20 jan 2011)
Just as a package sent by mail can bear a stamp “fragile”, “breakable” or “handle with care”, consider the exact opposite: a package that has stamped on it “please mishandle” or “please handle carelessly”. The contents of such package are not just unbreakable, impervious to shocks, but have something more than that , as they tend to benefit from shocks. This is beyond robustness.
More recently, research in Mark Jung-Beeman’s lab at Northwestern has found that sudden bursts of insight — the Aha! or Eureka! moment — comes when brain activity abruptly shifts its focus. The almost ecstatic sense that makes us cry “I see!” appears to come when the brain is able to shunt aside immediate or familiar visual inputs.
That may explain why so many of us close our eyes (often unwittingly) just before we exclaim “I see!” It also suggests, at least to me, that creativity can be enhanced deliberately through environmental variation. Two techniques seem promising: varying what you learn and varying where you learn it. I try each week to read a scientific paper in a field that is new to me — and to read it in a different place.
New associations often leap out of the air at me this way; more intriguingly, others seem to form covertly and then to lie in wait for the opportune moment when they can click into place. I do not try to force these associations out into the open; they are like shrinking mimosa plants that crumple if you touch them but bloom if you leave them alone.
Haecceity is originally a metaphysical concept that is both totally obscure and yet very familiar to all of us. It is the psychological attribution of an unobservable property to an object that makes it unique among identical copies. (THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011— Page 1)(20 jan 2011)
There is
a famous
passage from Alfred Marshall (in 1890) which is traditionally trotted out
on these occasions, and far be it from me to break with tradition:
When an industry has thus chosen a locality for itself, it is likely to stay
there long: so great are the advantages which people following the same skilled
trade get from near neighbourhood to one another. The mysteries of the trade
become no mysteries; but are as it were in the air, and children learn many of
them unconsciously. Good work is rightly appreciated, inventions and
improvements in machinery, in processes and the general organization of the
business have their merits promptly discussed: if one man starts a new idea, it
is taken up by others and combined with suggestions of their own; and thus it
becomes the source of further new ideas. And presently subsidiary trades grow
up in the neighbourhood, supplying it with implements and materials, organizing
its traffic, and in many ways conducing to the economy of its material.
Again, the economic use of expensive machinery can sometimes be attained in
a very high degree in a district in which there is a large aggregate production
of the same kind, even though no individual capital employed in the trade be
very large. For subsidiary industries devoting themselves each to one small
branch of the process of production, and working it for a great many of their
neighbours, are able to keep in constant use machinery of the most highly
specialized character, and to make it pay its expenses, though its original
cost may have been high, and its rate of depreciation very rapid.
Again, in all but the earliest stages of economic development a localized
industry gains a great advantage from the fact that it offers a constant market
for skill. Employers are apt to resort to any place where they are likely to
find a good choice of workers with the special skill which they require; while
men seeking employment naturally go to places where there are many employers
who need such skill as theirs and where therefore it is likely to find a good
market. The owner of an isolated factory, even if he has access to a plentiful
supply of general labour, is often put to great shifts for want of some special
skilled labour; and a skilled workman, when thrown out of employment in it, has
no easy refuge. Social forces here co-operate with economic: there are often
strong friendships between employers and employed: but neither side likes to
feel that in case of any disagreeable incident happening between them, they
must go on rubbing against one another: both sides like to be able easily to
break off old associations should they become irksome. These difficulties are
still a great obstacle to the success of any business in which special skill is
needed, but which is not in the neighbourhood of others like it: they are
however being diminished by the railway, the printing-press and the
telegraph.
As an example, Pilhwa Lee and I have recently been working on a model to describe the physics that is involved in wound healing. When an organism is wounded, epithelial cells crawl to fill in the wounded area. An experimental method for exploring this process is to grow a monolayer of epithelial cells on a substrate and then to “wound” the layer using a scalpel or some other object to scrape away a region of cells. Pascal Silberzan and co-workers have shown that the motion of the cells during wound healing is not trivial and involves long-range order and complex cellular flows [56]. Based on these observations and an analogy between crawling cells and the collective swimming of bacteria, we proposed a model that captures many features that are observed in wound healing assays. We suggest that two dominant physical attributes are responsible for most of the processes involved in wound healing: (i) the dipole nature of the stress distribution of a crawling cell and (ii) cell-cell adhesions. This model absorbs all of the complex biochemistry and actin dynamics inside a cell into two parameters that describe the stress that a cell exerts on its surroundings, and cell-cell adhesion dynamics can be shown to lead to visco-elastic couplings between cells [Fig. 3 (b)]. Therefore, where many groups have focused extensively on the complex biochemical interactions inside the cell, at a functional level (i.e., healing of a wound), many of the molecular details may only act to regulate a few bulk physical parameters.
“Everyone is a heck of a lot stronger than they think,” he tells me. “We inherently don’t like exerting a lot of energy. There’s a difference between expending and exerting.”
In the previous section’s examples, we defined module methods, methods whose names were prefixed by the module name. If this made you think of class methods, your next thought might well be “what happens if I define instance methods within a module?” Good question. A module can’t have instances, because a module isn’t a class. However, you can include a module within a class definition. When this happens, all the module’s instance methods are suddenly available as methods in the class as well. They get mixed in. In fact, mixed-in modules effectively behave as superclasses.
module Debug
def whoAmI?
"#{self.type.name} (\##{self.id}): #{self.to_s}"
end
end
class Phonograph
include Debug
# ...
end
class EightTrack
include Debug
# ...
end
ph = Phonograph.new("West End Blues")
et = EightTrack.new("Surrealistic Pillow")
ph.whoAmI?
>> "Phonograph (#537766170): West End Blues"
et.whoAmI?
>> "EightTrack (#537765860): Surrealistic Pillow"
When designing a class interface, it’s important to consider just how much access to your class you’ll be exposing to the outside world. Allow too much access into your class, and you risk increasing the coupling in your application—users of your class will be tempted to rely on details of your class’s implementation, rather than on its logical interface. (Classes, Objects, and Variables @ Programming Ruby)(14 jan 2011)
This is more than a curiosity. In his landmark book Object-Oriented Software Construction, Bertrand Meyer calls this the Uniform Access Principle. By hiding the difference between instance variables and calculated values, you are shielding the rest of the world from the implementation of your class. You’re free to change how things work in the future without impacting the millions of lines of code that use your class. This is a big win.
During the question-and-answer period, though, a woman asked the neuroscientist how his studies had changed the way he lived. He paused for a second, and then starting talking about a group he had joined called the Russian-American Folk Dance Company. It was odd, given how hard and scientific he had sounded. “I guess I used to think of myself as a lone agent, who made certain choices and established certain alliances with colleagues and friends,” he said. “Now, though, I see things differently. I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.
“And though history has made us self-conscious in order to enhance our survival prospects, we still have deep impulses to erase the skull lines in our head and become immersed directly in the river. I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when we connect with other people. I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.”(14 jan 2011)
While they were negotiating these issues, something deeper was going on. It had to do with the familiar pleasure one feels when the internal networks of the mind and the outer patterns of reality suddenly match. Friends who are having a conversation begin to replicate each other’s vocal patterns. People in conversations begin to mimic the body language of the other person, and, the more closely they mimic the body language, the more perceptive they are about the other person’s emotions. As the neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni notes, “vicarious” is not a strong enough word to describe the effect of these mental processes. The brain exists within the skull, but the mind extends outward and arises from the interactions between people or between a person and the environment.(14 jan 2011)
According to research by Faby Gagné, of Yorkville University, and John Lydon, of McGill, ninety-five per cent of people in relationships believe that their partner is above average in looks, intelligence, warmth, and sense of humor. (Other research shows that people describe former lovers as closed-minded, emotionally unstable, and generally unpleasant(14 jan 2011)
As Erica and Harold semi-embraced, they took in each other’s pheromones. Smell is a surprisingly powerful sense in these situations. People who lose their sense of smell eventually suffer greater emotional deterioration than people who lose their vision(14 jan 2011)
He didn’t dazzle his teachers with academic brilliance, but, even in kindergarten, he could tell you who in his class was friends with whom; he was aware of social networks. Scientists used to think that we understand each other by observing each other and building hypotheses from the accumulated data. Now it seems more likely that we are, essentially, method actors who understand others by simulating the responses we see in them.(14 jan 2011)
As a newborn, Harold, like all babies, was connecting with his mother. He gazed at her. He mimicked. His brain was wired by her love (the more a rat pup is licked and groomed by its mother, the more synaptic connections it has). Harold’s mother, in return, read his moods. A conversation developed between them, based on touch, gaze, smell, rhythm, and imitation. When Harold was about eleven months old, his mother realized that she knew him better than she’d ever known anybody, even though they’d never exchanged a word.(14 jan 2011)
1) Leaders are unable to tell when the technical staff is not performing up to snuff, because they cannot reliably differentiate between excuses for poor technical performance and true obstacles that arise when contending with difficult technical challenges. Performance management then becomes impossible, leading to mediocre work and eventually, outright and repeated project failures.(13 jan 2011)
“Easiest way to add insult to injury is when you’re signing someone’s cast.”(13 jan 2011)
At this point I’d go with a simple day-by-day dump of your key indicators. It’s silly to just count #signups as that alone means nothing. What you need are engaged active customers, otherwise they’ll all cancel. You need to measure what are good indicators of activity. For a project management tool this might be number of projects created, number of invites activated, number of messages posted. You should be happier with ten very active users, than with one hundred zombies who logged in and left.
When working with startups, Ferriss sees one problem popping up over and over. “The biggest weakness I see is companies getting focused on implementing new features,” he says. “That’s the biggest waste of time that I see. They have a viable product that people are paying for and instead of identifying their cheapest avenue for acquiring profitable costumers or focusing on polishing the product they already have, they focus on adding ten new features.
He took 6 prospective titles that everyone could live with: including ‘Broadband and White Sand’, ‘Millionaire Chameleon’ and ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ and developed a Google Adwords campaign for each. He bid on keywords related to the book’s content including ‘401k’ and ‘language learning’: when those keywords formed part of someone’s search on Google the prospective title popped up as a headline and the advertisement text would be the subtitle. Ferriss was interested to see which of the sponsored links would be clicked on most, knowing that he needed his title to compete with over 200,000 books published in the US each year. At the end of the week, for less than $200 he knew that “The 4-Hour Workweek” had the best click-through rate by far and he went with that title.
His experimentation didn’t stop there, he decided to test various covers by printing them on high quality paper and placing them on existing similar sized books in the new non-fiction rack at Borders, Palo Alto. He sat with a coffee and observed, learning which cover really was most appealing.
When you have a long article to share on Reader, what's more effective: to select the whole thing so that it's readable without opening a new tab, or to excerpt only a small portion so that a potential reader, not knowing how long it is, might somehow precommit to reading it in the very act of opening a new tab?(12 jan 2011)
But, as Simmons curiously fails to mention, the big problem with same-position rivalries in a game like football is that Manning and Brady do not directly compete against each other. Their teams play, but the two are never on the field at the same time. Never. Contrast that with tennis, soccer, hockey, and even (sorta) baseball. And basketball. Especially basketball. Kobe and Wade (to pick just one example) battle one another at both ends of the floor for the entire game.(12 jan 2011)
That is quite similar to Cavell’s description of his own experience working on Lear as “overtly and continuously demanding explicit and systematic exercise of imagination and articulation.” As was true in Austin’s classroom, so too in the theater you must “weigh with others every word.” Cavell would later call this, in an essay he would write for Austin’s class, the “theatricality of everyday life,” the way in which practical deliberation and language are suffused with a dramatic sense of how we understand where we are, where we have come from, and what we do next. (Stanley Cavell’s Philosophical Improvisations - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education)(11 jan 2011)
Years later, as a student at Harvard, Cavell would find himself elated as he listened to Austin’s lectures on such seemingly pedestrian topics as the language of excuses. What was it in these lectures that prompted in him such an exuberant response? It was, quite simply, an appreciation of the philosophical significance of the drama of ordinary speech. Austin’s philosophical manner arises out of a “perpetual imagination” of “what is said when, why a thing is said, hence how, in what context.” (Stanley Cavell’s Philosophical Improvisations - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education)(11 jan 2011)
what I seem to admire most in a conversation partner has to do with what they're able to draw out of me. does that make me some kind of an asshole?(11 jan 2011)
…[C]onsider the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger…
It is not clear whether the expression “when in actual service in time of war or public danger” attaches just to “in the militia” or to all of “in the land or naval forces, or in the militia”. This unclarity makes a big difference, especially to someone “in the land or naval forces” who has been accused of committing a crime during peacetime.
Source: Robert E. Rodes, Jr. & Howard Pospesel, Premises and Conclusions: Symbolic Logic for Legal Analysis (Prentice-Hall, 1997), p. 11.
Exposition:
Linguistically, an amphiboly is an ambiguity which results from ambiguous grammar, as opposed to one that results from the ambiguity of words or phrases—that is, Equivocation. The fallacy of Amphiboly occurs when a bad argument trades upon grammatical ambiguity to create an illusion of cogency. Amphibolies are often linguistic boobytraps, but less frequently do they occur in fallacious arguments.
Buttering-up is a type of a double-barreled question. It happens when one of the questions is a question that the questioned person will want to answer “yes” to, and another that the questioner hopes will be answered with the same “yes”. For example, “Would you be a nice guy and lend me five bucks?”
One form of misleading discourse is where something is presupposed and implied without being said explicitly, by phrasing it as a question. For example, the question “Does Mr. Jones have a brother in the army?” does not claim that he does, but implies that there must be at least some indication that he does, or the question would not need to be asked.[2] The person asking the question is thus protected from accusations of making false claims, but still manages to make the implication in the form of a hidden compound question. The fallacy isn’t in the question itself, but rather in the listener’s assumption that the question would not have been asked without some evidence to support the supposition. This example seems harmless, but consider: “Does Mr. Jones have a brother in jail?”
A real-life example of this was seen during the 2000 South Carolina Republican presidential primary, during which voters were asked “Would you be more or less likely to vote for Senator McCain if you knew he had fathered Alex Quan Ngo?” Asking the question implied that there was reason to think he had fathered Alex Quan Ngo.[citation needed]
In order to have the desired effect, the question must imply something uncommon enough not to be asked without some evidence to the fact. For example, the question “Does Mr. Jones have a brother?” would not cause the listener to think there must be some evidence that he does, since this form of general question is frequently asked with no foreknowledge of the answer.
People REALLY need to remember that the law is (or tries to be) pragmatic. “Magic bullets” rarely/never exist. You couldn’t sneak in a clause saying “I get a 100% pay increase annually” — in this case, they’re the party being bound so would need some indication of assent beyond just a paycheck.
Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Simpsons, Roger Ramjet and Beavis and Butthead are the most successful “written” cartoons, and they’re minute exceptions. The vast majority of script-written cartoons are horrible. While there are certainly horrible storyboard-written cartoons too, I think you would find a higher percentage of good storyboard-written cartoons compared to bad, than good script-written cartoons compared to bad. And, as I said earlier, the best of the script-written can’t touch the best of the storyboard-written. Script-written cartoons are missing a vital element of the cartoon art form — the cartoon part. They’re sort of like rap music. Rap music is music without the music. It’s rhythm only. Some of it’s very appealing. But does the best of it compare to real music — music written by musicians? Would you compare Ice Cube to Tchaikowski?(10 jan 2011)
They stuff smartphones into footballs or launch them from a device called a potato cannon or spud gun, which shoots a projectile through a pipe. Packages are sometimes camouflaged with a coating of grass, which makes them hard for guards to detect. The drops are coordinated through texts or calls between inmates and people outside, said Jon Ozmint, director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, which confiscates as many as 2,000 cellphones a year.
Let me conclude. Automatic computers have now been with us for a quarter of a century. They have had a great impact on our society in their capacity of tools, but in that capacity their influence will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture, compared with the much more profound influence they will have in their capacity of intellectual challenge without precedent in the cultural history of mankind. Hierarchical systems seem to have the property that something considered as an undivided entity on one level, is considered as a composite object on the next lower level of greater detail; as a result the natural grain of space or time that is applicable at each level decreases by an order of magnitude when we shift our attention from one level to the next lower one. We understand walls in terms of bricks, bricks in terms of crystals, crystals in terms of molecules etc. As a result the number of levels that can be distinguished meaningfully (09 jan 2011)
The third project I would not like to leave unmentioned is LISP, a fascinating enterprise of a completely different nature. With a few very basic principles at its foundation, it has shown a remarkable stability. Besides that, LISP has been the carrier for a considerable number of in a sense our most sophisticated computer applications. LISP has jokingly been described as “the most intelligent way to misuse a computer”. I think that description a great compliment because it transmits the full flavour of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.
You’re thrilled that your kit is so popular and flattered that these retailers, who can reach many more people than your own website, want to sell it. But since you’re still selling it yourself at $25, that’s the market price and the retailers typically can’t sell it for more (if manufacturers undercut their retail partners, that’s called “channel conflict” and typically leads to trouble).
The retailers ask for a lower price because they need to make their own profit on each one, usually around 50%. So they need to buy them at no more than $17 each. Now you’ve got to sell each one at a loss! Your costs, which were once within the limits of hobby spending, are now at risk of driving you into debt.
Thus the rule of 2.3x. You should price your product at at least 2.3 times its cost to allow for at least one 50% margin for you and another 50% margin for your retailer (1.5 x 1.5 = 2.25).
drew's voice: "you shut your mouth when you talk to me"(06 jan 2011)
let’s throw it down the step and see if a cat licks it up(05 jan 2011)
you oughta be in atlantic city at the hairsplitters convention(05 jan 2011)
As a bonus I managed to convince the entire class that taking notes was not worthwhile. I learned this lesson about math in first year undergrad. What you do is read ahead in the textbook. If you really want a set of notes, you can make them from the textbook before class. Then show up at class having read the day’s material and ready to pay attention. Then if anything that the professor says doesn’t make sense to you when you’re paying attention and have already read the day’s lesson, then ask the question then and there. If you don’t understand it, then probably nobody else does either. Add to that periodic reviews, and you’ll have a huge edge in any math courses. (Random Observations: Teaching linear algebra)(05 jan 2011)
Of course the challenge is getting students to ask questions. My strategy was simple: I told them that someone will ask questions and someone will answer them, but they don’t want me to be the one asking questions. On the second day nobody asked me any questions and I had to demonstrate. I picked a random person and asked her to explain a key point from the first day’s lecture. She couldn’t. I asked another student the same question. Again difficulty. I asked if everyone was sure that they had no questions. Someone asked me the question that I had been asking everyone else. I answered the question, answered the follow-up, and the point was made. I never again had to ask a question during question and answer period. :-) (Random Observations: Teaching linear algebra)(05 jan 2011)
All homework sets were cumulative. Generally 1/3 was the current day’s material, 1/3 from the last week, and 1/3 from anywhere in the course. Those thirds were in increasing order of difficulty.
This was the most important idea I wanted to try. I had long been aware that research on memory had demonstrated that when you’re reminded of something as you’re forgetting it, it goes into much longer term memory. As a result periodic review at lengthening intervals is very effective in increasing long term recall. A typical effective study schedule being to review after half an hour, the next day, the next week, then the next month.
Now of course you can tell students this until you’re blue in the face - but they won’t do it. However when the study schedule is disguised as homework, they don’t have a choice. (Random Observations: Teaching linear algebra)(05 jan 2011)
Homework not present at the start of class would not be accepted. However students were only graded on the best 20 out of 27 possible homework sets.
All homework sets were cumulative. Generally 1/3 was the current day’s material, 1/3 from the last week, and 1/3 from anywhere in the course. Those thirds were in increasing order of difficulty.
Every class would start with a question and answer session to last no less than 10 minutes.
Every student could expect to be asked at least one question every other class.
In grad school I managed to take advantage of the pacing effect in an educational setting. I was teaching linear algebra. What I did was make the homework incremental - 1/3 of homework on today’s material, 1/3 on the previous week, and 1/3 anything in the course. Those thirds were in increasing order of difficulty.
I also started every class with a question/answer period. The rules were simple, the questioning will last at least 10 minutes, and you don’t want me to ask the questions. :-) Anything that had come up in the questions that seemed to be a point of confusion was sure to be added to the next homework set.
I won’t go into what else I did with that class, but the end result is worth thinking about. First note that I gave a ridiculously hard final. Other grad students who saw it thought that the class would bomb. Secondly they aced the test. What do I mean by aced? Well I had a bonus question which fellow grad students thought nobody would get. 70% of the class got that question, and a good fraction were over 100% on the test. So they must have studied hard, right? Nope. I ran into some students several months later. They told me that they tried to study for the final and stopped after a few minutes because it was useless, they knew everything. And several months later they still knew much of the material cold!
what "proofread" means when you're talking about proof-based math homework(05 jan 2011)
They did a series of studies that started with fairly complicated questions about statistical significance that people were getting wrong and they boiled them down, over the years, to simpler and simpler questions that people couldn’t get – people were making, sometimes called cognitive illusions. This book was the first place that a lot of these things were published. It came out in the early 1980s, and it’s a collection of articles. It has about 25 different chapters by different people, the top people in the field describing all sorts of experiments. I like to say that this is the best-edited book that I’ve ever seen, at least since the New Testament. (Andrew Gelman | The Browser)(05 jan 2011)
4. Keep on reading within the field you work on. There will be a tendency to assume you “know it all,” but the perspectives of outsiders will remain valuable, even if they commit stupid blunders on some of the details.(05 jan 2011)
When we publish only results we know to be correct, because they agree with mainstream beliefs, we introduce a bias into the scientific process. In reality, if you publish 20 experiments with p=0.05 [1], 1 of them should be incorrect. If less than 1 in 20 of your papers isn’t wrong (assuming p=0.05 is the gold standard), you are not doing science.
You can see a perfect illustration of this when people tried to reproduce Millikan’s oil drop experiment. I’ll quote Feynman: Millikan measured the charge on an electron…got an answer which we now know not to be quite right…It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn’t they discover the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that…
Harbaugh, a quarterback who starred for the Wolverines before playing 15 seasons in the N.F.L., has a special affinity for Luck, whom he described as “the straw that stirs the drink around here.”(04 jan 2011)
"[T]he Constitution is no simple contract," the justice said back in June, "not because it uses a certain amount of open-ended language, but because its language grants and guarantees many good things, and good things that compete with each other and can never all be realized, altogether, all at once."(03 jan 2011)
Seventy-five years later, Benjamin's assertion that "the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character" looks especially prescient.(03 jan 2011)
People appreciate and catch on to a mathematical theory much better after
they have first grappled for themselves with the questions the theory is designed to answer.
There is a natural tendency, in teaching mathematics, to use the logical order
and to explain all the techniques and answers before bringing up the examples and the questions, on the supposition that the students will be equipped with all the techniques necessary to answer them when they arise.
It is better to keep interesting unanswered questions and unexplained examples
in the air, whether or not the students, the teachers, or anybody is yet ready to answer them. The best psychological order for a sub ject in mathematics is often quite different from the most efficient logical order.
As mathematicians, we know that there will never be an end to unanswered
questions. In contrast, students generally perceive mathematics as something which is already cut and dried—they have just not gotten very far in digesting it.(03 jan 2011)
One feature of mathematics which requires special care in education is its ‘height,’ that is, the extent to which concepts build on previous concepts. Reasoning in mathematics can be very clear and certain, and, once a principle is established, it can be relied on. This means it is possible to build conceptual structures which are at once very tall, very reliable, and extremely powerful.(03 jan 2011)
After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people “agglomerate,” cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars. It doesn’t matter if the place is Manhattan or Manhattan, Kan.: the urban patterns remain the same. West isn’t shy about describing the magnitude of this accomplishment. “What we found are the constants that describe every city,” he says. “I can take these laws and make precise predictions about the number of violent crimes and the surface area of roads in a city in Japan with 200,000 people. I don’t know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it. And the reason I can do that is because every city is really the same.” After a pause, as if reflecting on his hyperbole, West adds: “Look, we all know that every city is unique. That’s all we talk about when we talk about cities, those things that make New York different from L.A., or Tokyo different from Albuquerque. But focusing on those differences misses the point. Sure, there are differences, but different from what? We’ve found the what.” (A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation - NYTimes.com)(03 jan 2011)
The fundamental attribution error posits inter alia that individuals tend to “ignore situational information in favor of dispositional information” when evaluating others (but overplay situational information when evaluating themselves). So, for example, if I miss a free throw in an old gym, I’ll tend to blame it on a bent rim. If you miss a free throw in the same gym, I’ll tend to blame it on your poor shooting prowess.(02 jan 2011)
These two features of the problem—“going short on volatility” and “getting there first”—are related. Let’s say that Goldman Sachs regularly secures a lot of the best and quickest trades, whether because of its quality analysis, inside connections or high-frequency trading apparatus (it has all three). It builds up a treasure chest of profits and continues to hire very sharp traders and to receive valuable information. Those profits allow it to make “short on volatility” bets faster than anyone else, because if it messes up, it still has a large enough buffer to pad losses. This increases the odds that Goldman will repeatedly pull in spectacular profits.
Still, every now and then Goldman will go bust, or would go bust if not for government bailouts. But the odds are in any given year that it won’t because of the advantages it and other big banks have. It’s as if the major banks have tapped a hole in the social till and they are drinking from it with a straw. In any given year, this practice may seem tolerable—didn’t the bank earn the money fair and square by a series of fairly normal looking trades? Yet over time this situation will corrode productivity, because what the banks do bears almost no resemblance to a process of getting capital into the hands of those who can make most efficient use of it. And it leads to periodic financial explosions. That, in short, is the real problem of income inequality we face today. It’s what causes the inequality at the very top of the earning pyramid that has dangerous implications for the economy as a whole.
The upshot of all this for our purposes is that the “going short on volatility” strategy increases income inequality. In normal years the financial sector is flush with cash and high earnings. In implosion years a lot of the losses are borne by other sectors of society. In other words, financial crisis begets income inequality. Despite being conceptually distinct phenomena, the political economy of income inequality is, in part, the political economy of finance. (The Inequality That Matters - Tyler Cowen - The American Interest Magazine)(02 jan 2011)
To understand how this strategy works, consider an example from sports betting. The NBA’s Washington Wizards are a perennially hapless team that rarely gets beyond the first round of the playoffs, if they make the playoffs at all. This year the odds of the Wizards winning the NBA title will likely clock in at longer than a hundred to one. I could, as a gambling strategy, bet against the Wizards and other low-quality teams each year. Most years I would earn a decent profit, and it would feel like I was earning money for virtually nothing. The Los Angeles Lakers or Boston Celtics or some other quality team would win the title again and I would collect some surplus from my bets. For many years I would earn excess returns relative to the market as a whole.
Yet such bets are not wise over the long run. Every now and then a surprise team does win the title and in those years I would lose a huge amount of money. Even the Washington Wizards (under their previous name, the Capital Bullets) won the title in 1977–78 despite compiling a so-so 44–38 record during the regular season, by marching through the playoffs in spectacular fashion. So if you bet against unlikely events, most of the time you will look smart and have the money to validate the appearance. Periodically, however, you will look very bad. Does that kind of pattern sound familiar? It happens in finance, too. Betting against a big decline in home prices is analogous to betting against the Wizards. Every now and then such a bet will blow up in your face, though in most years that trading activity will generate above-average profits and big bonuses for the traders and CEOs.
In terms of immediate political stability, there is less to the income inequality issue than meets the eye. Most analyses of income inequality neglect two major points. First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well. Bill Gates is much, much richer than I am, yet it is not obvious that he is much happier if, indeed, he is happier at all. I have access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet and virtually all of the technical innovations that Gates does. Like the vast majority of Americans, I have access to some important new pharmaceuticals, such as statins to protect against heart disease. To be sure, Gates receives the very best care from the world’s top doctors, but our health outcomes are in the same ballpark. I don’t have a private jet or take luxury vacations, and—I think it is fair to say—my house is much smaller than his. I can’t meet with the world’s elite on demand. Still, by broad historical standards, what I share with Bill Gates is far more significant than what I don’t share with him.
Compare these circumstances to those of 1911, a century ago. Even in the wealthier countries, the average person had little formal education, worked six days a week or more, often at hard physical labor, never took vacations, and could not access most of the world’s culture. The living standards of Carnegie and Rockefeller towered above those of typical Americans, not just in terms of money but also in terms of comfort. Most people today may not articulate this truth to themselves in so many words, but they sense it keenly enough. So when average people read about or see income inequality, they don’t feel the moral outrage that radiates from the more passionate egalitarian quarters of society. Instead, they think their lives are pretty good and that they either earned through hard work or lucked into a healthy share of the American dream. (The persistently unemployed, of course, are a different matter, and I will return to them later.) It is pretty easy to convince a lot of Americans that unemployment and poverty are social problems because discrete examples of both are visible on the evening news, or maybe even in or at the periphery of one’s own life. It’s much harder to get those same people worked up about generalized measures of inequality.
The opinion first looked at Moore’s claim of property interests under existing law. The court first rejected the argument that a person has an absolute right to the unique products of their body because his products were not unique. (“[the cells are] no more unique to Moore than the chemical formula for hemoglobin”). The court then rejected the argument that his spleen should be protected as property in order to protect Moore’s privacy and dignity. The court held these interests were already protected by informed consent. The court noted laws that required the destruction of human organs as some indication that the legislature had intended to prevent patients from possessing their extracted organs. Finally, the property at issue may not have been Moore’s cells but the cell line created from Moore’s cells.
The court then looked at the policy behind having Moore’s cells considered property. Because conversion of property is a strict liability tort, the court feared that extending property rights to include organs would have a chilling effect on medical research. Laboratories doing research receive a large volume of medical samples and could not be expected to know or discover whether somewhere down the line their samples were illegally converted. Furthermore, Moore’s interest in his bodily integrity and privacy are protected by the requirement of informed consent (which must also inform about economic interests).
But the website’s real power came when IMDb began a service for film industry professionals for a fee.
The IMDb pro-site has become the industry guide and users pay an extra fee to see exactly what film fans across the world are searching for.
The figures are regarded as industry gold and can make or break careers in the notoriously tough industry. (Momentum: Revealed: The guy who runs IMDb)(31 dec 2010)
In my defense, I grew up in a small town, in a farming environment. We valued efficiency over ritual. Inefficiency was synonymous with stupidity. If there had been a way to eat faster by somehow involving your ass cheeks, that’s how I would have learned to do it. If someone sneezed where I grew up, there was no reason to say “God Bless you,” because either God was already handling it or he didn’t exist. (Scott Adams Blog: Forking Etiquette 12/30/2010)(30 dec 2010)
evolution as the organizing principle in biology and the provider of answers to whys(30 dec 2010)
“cure virus” as analogy to “cure cancer”(30 dec 2010)
An old rancher is talking about politics with a young man from the city. He compares a politician to a "post turtle". The young man doesn't understand and asks him what a post turtle is.
The old man says, "When you're driving down a country road and you see a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle. You know he didn't get up there by himself. He doesn't belong there; he can't get anything done while he's up there; and you just want to help the poor, dumb thing down."(28 dec 2010)
Student evaluations are positively correlated with contemporaneous professor value‐added and negatively correlated with follow‐on student achievement. That is, students appear to reward higher grades in the introductory course but punish professors who increase deep learning (introductory course professor value‐added in follow‐on courses).
Academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status of professors are negatively correlated with contemporaneous value‐added but positively correlated with follow‐on course value‐added. Hence, students of less experienced instructors who do not possess a doctorate perform significantly better in the contemporaneous course but perform worse in the follow‐on related curriculum.(25 dec 2010)
On the basis of observation, Wilbur concluded that birds changed the angle of the ends of their wings to make their bodies roll right or left.[25] The brothers decided this would also be a good way for a flying machine to turn—to “bank” or “lean” into the turn just like a bird—and just like a person riding a bicycle, an experience with which they were thoroughly familiar. Equally important, they hoped this method would enable recovery when the wind tilted the machine to one side (lateral balance). They puzzled over how to achieve the same effect with man-made wings and eventually discovered wing-warping when Wilbur idly twisted a long inner-tube box at the bicycle shop.[26]
Other aeronautical investigators regarded flight as if it were not so different from surface locomotion, except the surface would be elevated. They thought in terms of a ship’s rudder for steering, while the flying machine remained essentially level in the air, as did a train or an automobile or a ship at the surface. The idea of deliberately leaning, or rolling, to one side seemed either undesirable or did not enter their thinking.[27] Some of these other investigators, including Langley and Chanute, sought the elusive ideal of “inherent stability”, believing the pilot of a flying machine would not be able to react quickly enough to wind disturbances to use mechanical controls effectively. The Wright brothers, on the other hand, wanted the pilot to have absolute control.[28] For that reason, their early designs made no concessions toward built-in stability (such as dihedral wings). They deliberately designed their 1903 first powered flyer with anhedral (drooping) wings, which are inherently unstable, but less susceptible to upset by gusty sidewinds.
Although all arthropods use muscles attached to the inside of the exoskeleton to flex their limbs, spiders and a few other groups still use hydraulic pressure to extend them, a system inherited from their pre-arthropod ancestors.[18] As a result a spider with a punctured cephalothorax cannot extend its legs, and the legs of dead spiders curl up.[7] Spiders can generate pressures up to eight times their resting level to extend their legs,[19] and jumping spiders can jump up to 50 times their own length by suddenly increasing the blood pressure in the third or fourth pair of legs.[7] (Spider - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(24 dec 2010)
philosophy as a way to teach kids to "become troublesome"(24 dec 2010)
"What's so bad about being drunk?" … "Ask a glass of water"(24 dec 2010)
"they hung in the air exactly the way that bricks don't"(24 dec 2010)
The transistor’s low cost, flexibility, and reliability have made it a ubiquitous device. Transistorized mechatronic circuits have replaced electromechanical devices in controlling appliances and machinery. It is often easier and cheaper to use a standard microcontroller and write a computer program to carry out a control function than to design an equivalent mechanical control function.
The transistor revolutionized the electronics industry, allowing the Information Age to occur, and made possible the development of almost every modern electronical device, from telephones to computers to missiles. Bardeen’s developments in superconductivity, which won him his second Nobel, are used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
This research qualifies a social psychological truism: that people like others who like them (the reciprocity principle). College women viewed the Facebook profiles of four male students who had previously seen their profiles. They were told that the men (a) liked them a lot, (b) liked them only an average amount, or (c) liked them either a lot or an average amount (uncertain condition). Comparison of the first two conditions yielded results consistent with the reciprocity principle. Participants were more attracted to men who liked them a lot than to men who liked them an average amount. Results for the uncertain condition, however, were consistent with research on the pleasures of uncertainty. Participants in the uncertain condition were most attracted to the men-even more attracted than were participants who were told that the men liked them a lot. Uncertain participants reported thinking about the men the most, and this increased their attraction toward the men.
In 1975 Edsger W. Dijkstra, a major figure in the structured-programming movement, wrote a memo titled “How Do We Tell Truths that Might Hurt?” The “truths” were mostly Dijkstra’s opinions of programming languages; how he told them was very bluntly. Fortran is “an infantile disorder,” PL/I “a fatal disease,” APL “a mistake, carried through to perfection.” Students exposed to COBOL “are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration,” he said. “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.” (The Semicolon Wars» American Scientist)(21 dec 2010)
signaling when there are no cars around is like talking to yourself(21 dec 2010)
He provided a lot of statistics and made some recommendations, but the overriding theme and message of the book was that the result of shooting someone, or being shot, is unpredictable no matter what kind of weapon is involved. Some examples:
A fatal bullet through the heart can leave a guy up and shooting for over ten seconds — obviously an eternity for a law enforcement officer in a point-blank shootout.
A guy can get shot and not know it. Police officers are trained to check themselves carefully when any shots are fired, because it has happened that officers thought they were unharmed, went home, laid down to rest, and bled to death.
A guy can be in a shootout and THINK he got shot, and it turns out there’s not a mark on him. They get knocked over, feel intense pain, cry out, etc. There were enough of these cases that the researchers were able to find some involving officers who were previously decorated for valor and had in fact been shot before.
A guy can get shot multiple times with a powerful weapon and get lucky, or he can get shot with a tiny weapon and get unlucky. I still remember the story used to illustrate this: a fight between roommates got ugly, and one guy shot the other six times in the chest with a .45. The second guy went to his attic, found his great-grandfather’s Civil War-era relic small caliber revolver (something like a .22), went back downstairs, and shot his roommate through the heart, killing him. Forty-eight hours later, his desire for medical care overcame his aversion to getting caught, and he walked into an emergency room. He recovered completely.
Wallace would later identify his attraction to technical philosophy in aesthetic terms: It was, he suggested, a craving for a certain kind of beauty, for the variety of imaginative experience characteristic of formal systems like mathematics and chess. In an interview with the literary critic Larry McCaffery published in 1993, Wallace explained that as a philosophy student he had been “chasing a special sort of buzz,” a flash of feeling whose nature he didn’t comprehend at first. “One teacher called these moments ‘mathematical experiences,’ ” he recalled. “What I didn’t know then was that a mathematical experience was aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce’s original sense. These moments appeared in proof-completions, or maybe algorithms. Or like a gorgeously simple solution you suddenly see after filling half a notebook with gnarly attempted solutions. It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called ‘the click of a well-made box.’ The word I always think of it as is ‘click.’ ”
Wallace remembered being moved by its “cold formal beauty.” When the seminar moved on to Wittgenstein’s so-called late philosophy, in which he repudiates the ideas and austere methodology of the Tractatus in favor of new assumptions and a looser, less mathematical style, Wallace was not immediately impressed. He wrote to Olsen that at first he found Philosophical Investigations, the crowning statement of the late philosophy, to be “silly.” (The philosophical underpinnings of David Foster Wallace’s fiction. - By James Ryerson - Slate Magazine)(21 dec 2010)
Broom, then, belongs to the genre of the novel of ideas—books like Voltaire’s Candide and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, which all but instruct the reader to interpret them in light of certain schools of thought. (Candide is usually read as a parody of Leibnitz’s metaphysics, Nausea as a vision of Sartre’s existentialism.) In his essay “The Empty Plenum,” published in 1990, Wallace called this genre of writing “INTERPRET-ME fiction” and argued that it had a special role to play in the life of the mind. As he knew from chasing the “click” in math and technical philosophy, there are areas of inquiry that might seem remote from the concerns of everyday life but that can, in fact, offer an array of intimate emotional and aesthetic experiences. Even for the reader with an appetite for it, however, a theoretical work can be so intellectually taxing, so draining of one’s mental energies, that what Wallace called the “emotional implications” of the text are overlooked. The novel of ideas is at its most valuable, he contended, not when making abstruse ideas “accessible” or easy to digest for the reader, but rather when bringing these neglected undercurrents to the surface.
Wallace wrote “The Empty Plenum” in Boston in the summer of 1989, as he readied himself to begin the philosophy program at Harvard. The essay is an extended appreciation of David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress (“a work of genius,” in Wallace’s estimation), which came out in ‘88, a year after The Broom of the System, and which was also “about” Wittgenstein’s philosophy. It was an emotional reckoning, as Wallace read it, with the discussion of solipsism in Wittgenstein’s early work. Wallace felt that Markson’s novel had succeeded in uniting literature and philosophy in a way that he, in Broom, had tried but failed to do. (Wallace pronounced Broom “pretty dreadful.”) The circumstances in which Wallace was writing the essay only underscored for him the importance of Markson’s accomplishment. As Wallace prepared to seek a renewed merger of philosophy and fiction in his own life, at Harvard, he celebrated Markson as a novelist who, with the utmost artistry, had already fused the two. In defiance of “the rabid anti-intellectualism of the contemporary fiction scene,” Wallace wrote, Markson had demonstrated the still-vital role of the novel of ideas in joining together “cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life, transcendent truth-seeking & daily schlepping.” Markson had delivered on Wallace’s literary-philosophical ideal of “making heads throb heartlike.”
How did Wittgenstein get to this point? The Tractatus is concerned with a disarmingly basic question: How is language possible? When we consider the world around us, everything seems to interact with everything else causally, in accordance with the laws of nature. The exception is a certain strange thing we call language, which somehow manages to interact with other things in the world in an entirely different way: it represents them meaningfully. The ability to represent things allows us to communicate, enables us to deal with things that are not actually presentto us, and provides the fabric of our mental life, our daily thoughts. But how is it, exactly, that language produces meaning?
On the one hand, the answer is nowhere. Wittgenstein can’t make any sense of the philosophical self—any talk of it is, strictly speaking, nonsense. On the other hand, Wittgenstein can get some purchase on this question. He draws an analogy between the “I” (and the external world) and the eye (and the visual field): Though I cannot see my own eye in my visual field, the very existence of the visual field is nothing other than the working of my eye; likewise, though the philosophical self cannot be located in the world, the very experience of the world is nothing other than what it is to be an “I.” Nothing can be said about the self in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, but the self is mademanifest insofar as “the world is my world”—or, as Wittgenstein more strikingly phrases it, “I am my world.” This, he declares, is “how much truth there is in solipsism.”
In truth, however, the biographical literature suggests that Wittgenstein was perfectly at ease with the solipsism of the Tractatus, as well as oddly, even mystically consoled by its suggestion that ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual truths are unutterable. As for the development of the late philosophy, it seems to have had its origins not in a fear of solipsism but rather in two deeply resonant objections: a technical criticism that the British mathematician Frank Ramsey made in 1923 about the Tractatus’s treatment of the matter of “color-exclusion” and a playful challenge, posed by the Italian economist Piero Saffra, that Wittgenstein provide the “logical form” of a meaningful hand gesture. (The philosophical underpinnings of David Foster Wallace’s fiction. - By James Ryerson - Slate Magazine)(21 dec 2010)
the fact that fruits ripen as their seeds develop, so that when you eat them (and disperse them in your poop) they'll be ready to go(21 dec 2010)
But America in one sense was exactly as I expected it to be: a place of gripping public theatre at election times, and a place of great private virtue nearly all the time.
I found that private virtue on the night I arrived three years ago on a much-delayed New Year’s Eve flight, which slipped and stumbled through the icy skies over the choppy darkness of the cold prairies.
I chatted sporadically to the grandmotherly woman beside me about home, and family, although I cannot in truth remember much of what was said.
But I do remember what happened once we landed.
There were no taxis and my fellow passenger insisted, without checking with him, that her husband would happily drive me to my hotel.
It was a round trip for him in the Arctic midnight of a public holiday of perhaps two or three hours.
I expected to detect at least a flicker of surprise on his face when this was first put to him, but there was none.
“This is America son,” he told me, “We help each other out.”
Nothing that happened in the three years that followed was to undermine that first impression of friendliness and hospitality.
De Tocqueville toiled on higher slopes of creativity than me and did a pretty good job of understanding and explaining Americans, even though they get riled at the idea that foreigners can ever understand or explain them.
Still, for all his tireless labours and exalted musings, I bet nothing ever happened to him that explained as clearly as that five-minute conversation in an airport car park three years ago, exactly what it is like to live among those extraordinary people in that extraordinary place.
America has enormous debts but it still spends as much money on defence as all the rest of the world put together.
And if that makes you uncomfortable, it is worth remembering that wherever you are, there is a good chance that if your country is ever invaded, your leader’s first phone call will be to the White House in Washington.
After all, they reason, theirs is a country founded and created by migrants who had left the old world behind them.
And it is generally the most energetic and resourceful people who flee old lives to build new worlds, leaving their less enterprising fellow-countrymen behind them.
These guys spat about “the fetishization of ritualistic tribal hallucinagen use” and “Habermas’s critique of Foucault’s performative contradiction” in the same sentence.(20 dec 2010)
Some uploads could have robot bodies, while others could live in simulated computer worlds. Our descendants may place some of them in historical simulations, with simulated people who do not realize that they are simulated. How sure can I be now that I do not live in a future historical simulation? The more such future simulations there will be of this era, the higher a chance I must assign to this possibility. (More here.)
One change: a new incentive system instituted by coach Erik Spoelstra. Players are rewarded for defensive plays with offensive freedom: “If Dwyane Wade grabs a defensive rebound, he has the green light to do whatever he wants offensively. If LeBron James makes a defensive stop, he controls his own game on the other end of the court.” (The Miami Heat’s New Incentives - NYTimes.com)(18 dec 2010)
It is possible today to grow up in an American home with a 40-inch flat-screen television and a daily caloric intake so high that it actually becomes detrimental to health, but to lack access to basic medical and dental care, to run a material daily risk of rape or other profound physical violence, and to leave school functionally illiterate. Poverty today means something very different than it did in Dickens’ day, but it has not been abolished. And it seems to me that asking about the welfare of the lowest quintile is a much better way of approaching the problem of inequality in our society than looking at Gini coefficients.
We need to learn how to fight intelligence with stupidity, a paradigm change that emphasizes the impossibility of perfectly measuring risk, and therefore overcharges in ham-handed ways for apparently riskless positions. This would create an incentive to simplify balance sheets and to take risks that can be measured, and therefore charged for intelligently.
The tragedy and resulting public outcry was a major contributing factor to The Pharmacy Act 1868 which recognized the chemist and druggist as the custodian and seller of named poisons (as medicine was then formally known) (Bradford sweets poisoning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(17 dec 2010)
Clarify! Reveal! Don’t conceal! Don’t confuse! Show! Explain! Simplify! Economize! Open up areas! Don’t clutter! For God’s sake, if you don’t know about a subject you must draw, then find out! You’ll learn! So will your readers! Once drawn, you’ll keep memory of it — so, years later, you’ll recall it, if need be — photos help document/authenticate subjects, people, places, things, and we’re swarming with sources for such info — there’s no excuse for not using it — camels and palm trees and ‘copters and deserts and costumes are infinitely varied — their differing types provides you with pictorial fun and interest — ditto your readers! Use it! Learn!
Think! Think! Think!
— before you draw — while you draw — and after — and redraw, if it doesn’t work — be honest, with yourself! And your readers! Stop faking! You don’t know enough to do it well, so don’t! Learn! See! Observe!(17 dec 2010)
do you think someone who beats his wife and kids and then goes to a chinese restaurant and gets a fortune cookie that says "You always bring happiness to others" is thinking to himself, "Hey, maybe I do"? [cf. Seinfeld](17 dec 2010)
Critics say editorial anonymity gives the publication an “omniscient tone and pedantry” and hides the youth and inexperience of those writing articles. “The magazine is written by young people pretending to be old people,” quipped American author Michael Lewis in 1991 (The Economist - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(17 dec 2010)
In the cockpit, the non-flying pilot communicates with ATC (Air Traffic Control) while the flying pilot manipulates the autopilot. We both keep an eye on navigation and the aircraft systems.
Of all the phases of flight (takeoff, cruise, descent, approach and landing) this is where we are least taxed with duties. Oddly enough, our workload is exactly the opposite of the flight attendants’ workload.
We are often asked if we are allowed to read. Frankly, it depends on the airline. Some allow you to read as long as it doesn’t block the view of the instruments. Others either strictly forbid it or limit it to company material only.
More often than not, we are just shooting the breeze. By the end of the trip, you get to know the other pilot very well.(17 dec 2010)
Amazon has famously massive server capacity in order to handle the December e-commerce rush. That short holiday shopping window is so critical, and so intense, that even a few minutes of downtime could cost Amazon millions.
So Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) has spent years creating and refining an “elastic” infrastructure, called EC2, designed to automatically scale to handle giant traffic spikes. The company has so much spare server capacity, in fact, that it runs a sideline business hosting other websites. Its customers include the New York Times, Second Life, Etsy, Playfish, the Indianapolis 500 and the Washington Post.
… Amazon’s entire business model is built around handling intense traffic spikes. The holiday shopping season essentially is a month-long DDoS attack on Amazon’s servers — so the company has spent lavishly to fortify itself.
Anonymous quickly figured that out. Less than an hour after setting its sights on Amazon, the group’s organizers called off the attempt. “We don’t have enough forces,” they tweeted.(16 dec 2010)
One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.
In contrast to necrosis, which is a form of traumatic cell death that results from acute cellular injury, apoptosis, in general, confers advantages during an organism’s life cycle. For example, the differentiation of fingers and toes in a developing human embryo occurs because cells between the fingers apoptose; the result is that the digits are separate. (Apoptosis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(15 dec 2010)
The same Hox protein can act as a repressor at one gene and an activator at another. For example, in flies (Drosophila melanogaster) the protein product of the Hox gene Antennapedia activates genes that specify the structures of the 2nd thoracic segment, which contains a leg and a wing, and represses genes involved in eye and antenna formation[4]. Thus, legs and wings, but not eyes and antennae, will form wherever the Antennapedia protein is located. (Hox gene - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(15 dec 2010)
Although the protein sequence is highly conserved, the DNA sequence from which it is made is slightly less so, a result of codon degeneracy (i.e., more than one codon codes for the same amino acid). The reason for this high level of conservation is related to the function of these proteins. Hox genes set up the basic regional layout of an organism, so that eyes form on the head and not on the abdomen, and limbs form at the sides and not on the head. Even a single mutation in the DNA of these genes can have drastic effects on the organism (see Homeotic mutations, below), and so these genes have changed relatively little over time.
The homeodomain protein motif is highly conserved across vast evolutionary distances. The functional equivalence of Hox proteins can be demonstrated by the fact that a fly can function perfectly well with a chicken Hox protein in place of its own.[2] This means that, despite having a last common ancestor that lived over 670 million years ago[3], a given Hox protein in chickens and the homologous gene in flies are so similar that they can actually take each other’s places.
During early development, morphogen gradients generate different cell types in distinct spatial order. The morphogen provides spatial information by forming a concentration gradient that subdivides a field of cells by inducing or maintaining the expression of different target genes at distinct concentration thresholds. Thus, cells far from the source of the morphogen will receive low levels of morphogen and express only low-threshold target genes. In contrast, cells close to the source of morphogen will receive high levels of morphogen and will express both low- and high-threshold target genes. Distinct cell types emerge as a consequence of the different combination of target gene expression. In this way, the field of cells is subdivided into different types according to their position relative to the source of the morphogen. This is a general mechanism by which cell type diversity can be generated in animal development. (Morphogen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(15 dec 2010)
A vitamin is an organic compound required as a nutrient in tiny amounts by an organism.[1] In other words, an organic chemical compound (or related set of compounds) is called a vitamin when it cannot be synthesized in sufficient quantities by an organism, and must be obtained from the diet. Thus, the term is conditional both on the circumstances and the particular organism. For example, ascorbic acid (vitamin C) is a vitamin for humans, but not for most other animals, and biotin and vitamin D are required in the human diet only in certain circumstances. (Vitamin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(15 dec 2010)
A dendritic spine (or spine) is a small membranous protrusion from a neuron’s dendrite that typically receives input from a single synapse of an axon. Dendritic spines serve as a storage site for synaptic strength and help transmit electrical signals to the neuron’s cell body. Most spines have a bulbous head (the spine head), and a thin neck that connects the head of the spine to the shaft of the dendrite. The dendrites of a single neuron can contain hundreds to thousands of spines. In addition to spines providing an anatomical substrate for memory storage and synaptic transmission, they may also serve to increase the number of possible contacts between neurons. (Dendritic spine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(15 dec 2010)
The addition of a phosphate (PO4) molecule to a polar R group of an amino acid residue can turn a hydrophobic portion of a protein into a polar and extremely hydrophilic portion of molecule. In this way it can introduce a conformational change in the structure of the protein via interaction with other hydrophobic and hydrophilic residues in the protein. (Phosphorylation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(15 dec 2010)
When accepting payment by debit card, merchants pay a fixed commission fee (as opposed to a percentage) to their bank or merchant service provider. (This is because the commission paid by the merchant for accepting debit cards, unlike credit cards, does not need to fund interest free credit or other incentives).
Accepting payments in cash can be costly for merchants, given that many British banks charge around 0.5% for depositing cash into a business bank account, along with the costs of transporting and insuring the cash.
The combination of these two points means that the retailer can save money by offering the cashback service. It does not cost the retailer more in commission to add cashback to a debit card purchase, but in the process of giving cashback, the retailer can “offload” cash which they would otherwise have to pay to deposit at the bank.
Since 2005, revenue at The Atlantic has almost doubled, reaching $32.2 million this year, according to figures provided by the company. About half of that is advertising revenue. But digital advertising — projected to finish the year at $6.1 million — represents almost 40 percent of the company’s overall advertising take. In the magazine business, which has resisted betting its future on digital revenue, that is a rate virtually unheard of. (The Atlantic Turns a Profit, With an Eye on the Web - NYTimes.com)(14 dec 2010)
The bats’ eponymous white noses are just visible spore growth. The real damage occurs below. G. destructans lives on bat skin, invading hair follicles and sebaceous glands, forming pockets on the surface of exposed wings, breaking through into the epithelium beneath. There it breaks down connective tissue and muscle and nerves into digestible nutrients. Under a microscope, researchers liken G. destructans mycelium to spaghetti wriggling into meat. Another resemblance is the demon worms that consume animal flesh in Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. (The Desperate Battle Against Killer Bat Plague | Wired Science | Wired.com)(14 dec 2010)
solitaire is an output-feedback mode stream cipher(14 dec 2010)
But even without the overt game mechanics, the gamelike nature of social interaction is why we’re addicted to social media in general. It’s why I’m addicted to e-mail. Most e-mails I get are bullshit. But every once in a while, I get an e-mail that feels affirming in some special way—someone I like thought of me, someone is saying something nice to me, someone is telling me he wants to give me money, my wife is sending pictures of our daughter. Ergo, I check my e-mail about every twenty-seven seconds. (The Viral Me: Devin Friedman Investigates the New World of Social Networking: Big Issues: GQ)(14 dec 2010)
He’s right. It doesn’t feel radical when you use it. When you buy something, Blippy asks you to review it—to do more of the filtering the social layer needs to organize the Internet for you. Every time I reviewed something, it went into the live feed, and a few minutes later I would get a bunch of positive responses. People clicked “awesome” or “informative” or “funny.” It felt good. It felt like I’d finally found what most of us are looking for: a place where people would listen to us and congratulate us on our opinions about everything.
The system is gamed for that to happen. How do you make people be nice to one another? First, you install buttons for “awesome” and “funny.” Second, you use real identities. The social layer means that you have a static identity on the Internet. And while that’s more likely to help your future boss find the picture of you with the cock and balls drawn on your forehead (thanks, Rahul!), it also makes the Internet a kinder, more compassionate, more polite place. If people know it’s really you commenting on something on Blippy—you, the guy with the Facebook account and the girlfriend named Polly and the Phish fan page and all that—you’re much less likely to act like a creep. And third, you establish that behavior immediately. If the first hundred people who use the site behave a certain way, the next hundred thousand will behave the same way. It’s creating a feedback loop that makes you want to come back to the Web site. And the feedback loop is what forms the right addictive behavior for the site to work. Addiction is requisite.
Okay, people want to share stuff with the world. So the Internet gives us blogs. Lots of people use them. But you need to know how to code HTML to have a blog. So that’s a problem, and the people in Silicon Valley realize that. They get busy and build blogging platforms so those of us who don’t want to read manuals or learn how to do something hard can still tell everyone what we think. Blogger, then MovableType, then Tumblr., and so on. But there’s still a creative friction—you still have to have something entertaining to say. Even on MySpace, you were basically building and maintaining your own static Web site. That’s what Facebook made easier. You’re not in charge of doing anything besides populating the fields on your profile page, uploading some pictures, typing some words into the status-update box. You don’t have to be saying anything besides “At O’Hare,” or “Mayonnaise is awesome.” Same concept with Twitter: You only have 140 characters—there aren’t paralyzing creative options here. But Brian Pokorny thinks DailyBooth appeals to people who want even less friction than Twitter: Here, you don’t need to think of something witty or informative to say in 140 characters or fewer. All you have to do is take a picture of yourself. (The Viral Me: Devin Friedman Investigates the New World of Social Networking: Big Issues: GQ)(14 dec 2010)
Usage: It’s terribly important, at least in American business meetings, to be constantly acknowledging the contributions other people have made, so that everybody feels included. But instead of “as you said” or “as Jane mentioned”, it’s “to your point” or “to Jane’s point”. (Business clichés: The subtleties of corporate English | The Economist)(14 dec 2010)
Before pay phones became endangered I never thought of them as public spaces, which of course they are. They suggested a human average; they belonged to anybody who had a couple of coins. Now I see that, like public schools and public transportation, pay phones belong to a former commonality our culture is no longer quite so sure it needs. (Dearly Disconnected | Mother Jones)(14 dec 2010)
The later part of the 18th century was the age of Romanticism and the Gothic novel. There was an obsession with the bizarre and the supernatural.[3] A man named Paul Philidor was a conjuror who started this “black art” in Vienna. He called his show “Schröpferesque Geisterscheinings” (Schröpfer-style ghost appearances). In his shows, he used the magic lantern to trick people into thinking he had summoned up spirits of revolutionary figures with the lantern mounted on a trolley. He also summoned ghosts by requests. However, his show was eventually closed by the authorities due to their paranoia.[8] The audiences of these magic lantern shows reacted to the projections with bewilderment. They thought the projections were real dreams, visions, apparitions and ghosts, and the devil. This was just fueled by the fact that this is exactly what the early conjurers and magicians used them for: scaring people using these ghostly images (Magic lantern - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(14 dec 2010)
‘Worms do not posses any sense of hearing. They took not the least notice of the shrill of a metal whistle which was repeatedly sounded near them. Nor did they hear the deepest and loudest tones of a bassoon. They were indifferent to shouts if care was taken that the breath did not strike them. When placed on a table near a piano which was played as loudly as possible they remained perfectly quiet.’
But he goes on to say that if you put them on the piano they jumped like mad because they could feel the vibrations. And can you imagine getting your kids to play the bassoon to an earthworm? It really is wonderful. Anyone could do that – you could do that now with children in primary school but the fact is it was the great Charles Darwin who actually did it. (Adam Hart-Davis | FiveBooks)(14 dec 2010)
A sensible approach would perhaps be to compare all the genes from representative genomes of archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes. Those genes that are common to all three domains were in the LUCA and those that aren’t must have been added later. Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward, for two main reasons:
Some genes appear to have moved from organism to organism like genetic gypsies, confounding our ability to distinguish between features that are universal and date back to LUCA, and features that are universal because of genes moving about.
Some genes which were found in LUCA may no longer be universal. That means it may be impossible to distinguish some LUCA features from genes that arose later, say in the evolution of eukaryotes.
what purposes federalism serves:choice, competition, participation, experimentation, and the diffusion of power.(14 dec 2010)
I think the ones who don’t make it are too attached to their idea of who they are. Giving birth to a book is an exorcism of sorts. This much transformation terrifies people. Especially if you include “let someone else read it” in the definition of “book.”
Which means the cardinal sin in book writing is an age-old one. It’s called narcissism. As Nietzsche said (and I use this quote a lot), “how could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes!”
Franco’s professors, classmates, and colleagues insist, however, that this is not the case. According to everyone I spoke with, Franco has an unusually high metabolism for productivity. He seems to suffer, or to benefit, from the opposite of ADHD: a superhuman ability to focus that allows him to shuttle quickly between projects and to read happily in the midst of chaos. He hates wasting time—a category that includes, for him, sleeping. (He’ll get a few hours a night, then survive on catnaps, which he can fall into at any second, sometimes even in the middle of a conversation.) He doesn’t drink or smoke or—despite his convincingness in Pineapple Express—do drugs. He’s engineered his life so he can spend all his time either making or learning about art. When I asked people if Franco actually does all of his own homework, some of them literally laughed right out loud at me, because apparently homework is all James Franco ever really wants to do. The photo of him sleeping in class, according to his assistant, wasn’t even from one of his classes: It was an extra lecture he was sitting in on, after a full day of work and school, because he wanted to hear the speaker.
Take, for instance, graduate school. As soon as Franco finished at UCLA, he moved to New York and enrolled in four of them: NYU for filmmaking, Columbia for fiction writing, Brooklyn College for fiction writing, and—just for good measure—a low-residency poetry program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. This fall, at 32, before he’s even done with all of these, he’ll be starting at Yale, for a Ph.D. in English, and also at the Rhode Island School of Design. After which, obviously, he will become president of the United Nations, train a flock of African gray parrots to perform free colonoscopies in the developing world, and launch himself into space in order to explain the human heart to aliens living at the pulsing core of interstellar quasars. (The James Franco Project [New York Magazine])(13 dec 2010)
To return to my initial question: how does this story help us to understand the circular milling paradox? The answer is that the occasional but deadly formation of circular mills seems to be the evolutionary price that army ants pay to maintain such an ecologically successful and stable strategy of collective foraging. The sporadic appearance of this “pathological” behavior might thus be viewed as the footprints left by the evolutionary trajectory in which these ants have been trapped. (Army Ants Trapped by Their Evolutionary History)(13 dec 2010)
Non-contractibility is a bigger problem than you think. You can agree on the number of people, and the amount you will spend on flowers, but ex post many questions will pop up at the margin. One of the two persons will care more about the right answer than the other. One party will be more willing to work on the wedding than the other. Contract in advance for a method of disagreement resolution, not just on the details of the wedding. Get ready for the fact that one person cares less about the wedding than the other and realize this is not the same as caring less about the marriage.
Chindōgu(珍道具?) is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that, on the face of it, seem like an ideal solution to a particular problem. However, chindōgu has a distinctive feature: anyone actually attempting to use one of these inventions would find that it causes so many new problems, or such significant social embarrassment, that effectively it has no utility whatsoever. Thus, chindōgu are sometimes described as “unuseless” – that is, they cannot be regarded as ‘useless’ in an absolute sense, since they do actually solve a problem; however, in practical terms, they cannot positively be called “useful.” (Chindōgu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(12 dec 2010)
St. George says the most surprising aspect of JetBlue’s agency search was how many firms still believed that the key to solving any business problem was the 30-second spot. But maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised. Agencies still yearn for the fat 15% commissions they used to score off of a client’s media spend, a spend ballooned mostly by television commercials. The industry isn’t even close to adjusting to the truism that digital dimes don’t replace analog dollars, the very problem that bedevils music labels, publishers, and television networks. Today, agencies really have no clue as to how they should get paid. “We still don’t know how to monetize what we do,” admits Peter McGuinness, CEO of Gotham, which, like Mullen, is owned by IPG. “We don’t monetize ourselves properly, so we don’t hit our margins.”
GeniusRocket is what an ad agency looks like when it’s stripped of Madison Avenue skyscrapers, high-priced creatives on payroll, sushi dinners at Nobu, and two-week shoots at the Viceroy in Santa Monica. The firm is nothing more than a bare-bones website that crowdsources broadcast-ready TV ads from a pool of loosely vetted talent from Poland to Guam. A CMO accustomed to handing over millions of dollars to an agency for a campaign designed around a single spot can now hand GeniusRocket $40,000 — and get seven spots, each of which will be syndicated on 20 web platforms for tracking, testing, sentiment analysis, and wide distribution. GeniusRocket gleans a 20% to 40% commission, and the rest goes to the creators. “It seemed like an interesting, cost-effective way to get some new creative ideas,” says Marshall Hyzdu, the Kraft brand manager who hired GeniusRocket. “We fell in love with one spot.
The ad business became an assembly line as predictable as Henry Ford’s. The client (whose goal was to get the word out about a product) paid an agency’s account executive (whose job was to lure the client and then keep him happy), who briefed the brand planner (whose research uncovered the big consumer insight), who briefed the media planner (who decided which channel — radio, print, outdoor, direct mail, or TV — to advertise in). Then the copywriter/art director team would pass on its work (a big idea typically represented by storyboards for a 30-second TV commercial) to the producer (who worked with a director and editors to film and edit the commercial). Thanks to the media buyer (whose job was to wine-and-dine media companies to lower the price of TV spots, print pages, or radio slots), the ad would get funneled, like relatively fresh sausage, into some combination of those five mass media, which were anything but equal. TV ruled the world. After all, it not only reached a mass audience but was also the most expensive medium — and the more the client spent, the more money the ad agency made.
Given a bit of food, a starving girl in the Ukraine exclaims: “Now that I have eaten such wonderful things I can die happy!” In a synagogue in western Ukraine, several Jews scrape notes onto the wall before being shot in late 1942. “We are so sorry that you are not with us,” a daughter writes to her mother. “I cannot forgive myself this. We thank you, Mama, for all of your devotion. We kiss you over and over.” Now and again, a voice of one of the perpetrators breaks through, to horrific effect. “During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it,” a German policeman writes to his wife about his first experience shooting Jews. “Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.” (Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin)(12 dec 2010)
In 200940% of U.S. imports and exports was ‘related-party trade’ –”trade by U.S. companies with their subsidiaries abroad as well as trade by U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies with their parent companies.” That means companies are effectively trading with themselves, so they can choose which side of the transaction books the profits.(12 dec 2010)
(Feynman famously referred to gravity as the “greatest generalization achieved by the human mind.”)(11 dec 2010)
scrim
Noun/skrim/
scrims
plural
Strong, coarse fabric, chiefly used for heavy-duty lining or upholstery
A piece of gauze cloth that appears opaque until lit from behind, used as a screen or backdrop
A similar heatproof cloth put over film or television lamps to diffuse the light
It was pretty plain by, oh,
1848
at the latest that the kind of scientific knowledge we have now, and the
technological power that goes with it, radically alters, and even more
radically expands, the kind of societies are possible, lets us live
our lives in ways profoundly different from our ancestors. (For instance,
we can have affluence and liberty.) How then should
we live? becomes a question of real concern, because we have, in fact, the
power to change ourselves, and are steadily accruing more of it.
This, I think, is the question at the heart of science fiction at its best.
(This meshes with Jo
Walton’s apt
observation that one of the key aesthetic experiences of reading SF is
having a new world unfold in one’s mind.)(11 dec 2010)
Sachs therefore proposed a complex neologism of his own, “being-at-work-staying-the-same”.[14] Another translation in recent years is “being-at-an-end” (which Sachs has also used).[1]
Entelecheia, as can be seen by its derivation, is a kind of completeness, whereas “the end and completion of any genuine being is its being-at-work” (energeia). The entelecheia is a continuous being-at-work (energeia) when something is doing its complete “work”. For this reason, the meanings of the two words converge, and they both depend upon the idea that every thing’s “thinghood” is a kind of work, or in other words a specific way of being in motion. All things which exist now, and not just potentially, are beings-at-work, and all of them have a tendency towards being-at-work in a particular way which would be their proper and “complete” way.[14]
Sachs explains the convergence of energeia and entelecheia as follows, and uses the word actuality to describe the overlap between them:[1]
Just as energeia extends to entelecheia because it is the activity which makes a thing what it is, entelecheia extends to energeia because it is the end or perfection which has being only in, through, and during activity.
Aristotle invents the word by combining entelēs (complete, full-grown) with echein (= hexis, to be a certain way by the continuing effort of holding on in that condition), while at the same time punning on endelecheia (persistence) by inserting telos (completion). This is a three-ring circus of a word, at the heart of everything in Aristotle’s thinking, including the definition of motion.
Selections from The Bed of Procrustes, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
You have a calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.
Hatred is love with a typo somewhere in the computer code, correctable but very hard to find.
The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology.
When she shouts at you that what you did was unforgivable, she has already begun to forgive you.
To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.
Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis [practical thought, practical wisdom, prudence], and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him who he finds interesting.
Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.
Men destroy each other during war; themselves during peacetime.
We are hunters; we are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimulation from the environment.
Technology is at its best when it is invisible.
Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.
Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.
Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.
What I learned on my own I still remember. [Feynman said it better: What I cannot create, I do not understand.]
Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people's heads.
Finer men tolerate others' small inconsistencies though not the large ones; the weak tolerate others' large inconsistencies though not small ones.
Almutanabbi boasted that he was the greatest of all Arab poets, but he said so in the greatest of all Arab poems.
You can only convince people who think they can benefit from being convinced.
A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.
To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.
How superb to become wise without being boring; how sad to be boring without being wise.(11 dec 2010)
what it is like (in the nagelian phenomenological sense) to have a male orgasm? you know that feeling you get when you're on the verge of a good sneeze? and then you have the good sneeze? it's like that, but localized in the tip of your penis.(10 dec 2010)
Binding of a ligand to a cell-surface receptor stimulates a series of events inside the cell, with different types of receptor stimulating different intracellular responses. Receptors typically respond to only the binding of a specific ligand. Upon binding, the ligand initiates the transmission of a signal across the plasma membrane by inducing a change in the shape or conformation of the intracellular part of the receptor (see this link [2] for a molecular model for receptor activation). Often, such changes in conformation either result in the activation of an enzymatic activity contained within the receptor or expose a binding site for other signaling proteins within the cell. Once these proteins bind to the receptor, they themselves may become active and propagate the signal into the cytoplasm. (Signal transduction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(10 dec 2010)
Activation of genes,[23] alterations in metabolism,[24] the continued proliferation and death of the cell,[25] and the stimulation or suppression of locomotion,[26] are some of the cellular responses to extracellular stimulation that require signal transduction. Gene activation leads to further cellular effects, since the protein products of many of the responding genes include enzymes and transcription factors themselves. Transcription factors produced as a result of a signal transduction cascade can, in turn, activate yet more genes. Therefore an initial stimulus can trigger the expression of an entire cohort of genes, and this, in turn, can lead to the activation of any number of complex physiological events. These events include the increased uptake of glucose from the blood stream stimulated by insulin[24] and the migration of neutrophils to sites of infection stimulated by bacterial products. The set of genes and the order in which they are activated in response to stimuli are often referred to as a genetic program.[27]
Some believe dedifferentiation is an aberration of the normal development cycle that results in cancer,[5] whereas others believe it to be a natural part of the immune response lost by humans at some point as a result of evolution.
Development begins when a sperm fertilizes an egg and creates a single cell that has the potential to form an entire organism. In the first hours after fertilization, this cell divides into identical cells. In humans, approximately four days after fertilization and after several cycles of cell division, these cells begin to specialize, forming a hollow sphere of cells, called a blastocyst. The blastocyst has an outer layer of cells, and inside this hollow sphere, there is a cluster of cells called the inner cell mass. The cells of the inner cell mass go on to form virtually all of the tissues of the human body. Although the cells of the inner cell mass can form virtually every type of cell found in the human body, they cannot form an organism. These cells are referred to as pluripotent.
Pluripotent stem cells undergo further specialization into multipotentprogenitor cells that then give rise to functional cells. Examples of stem and progenitor cells include:
In developmental biology, cellular differentiation is the process by which a less specialized cell becomes a more specialized cell type. Differentiation occurs numerous times during the development of a multicellular organism as the organism changes from a simple zygote to a complex system of tissues and cell types. Differentiation is a common process in adults as well: adult stem cells divide and create fully-differentiated daughter cells during tissue repair and during normal cell turnover. Differentiation dramatically changes a cell’s size, shape, membrane potential, metabolic activity, and responsiveness to signals. These changes are largely due to highly-controlled modifications in gene expression. With a few exceptions, cellular differentiation almost never involves a change in the DNA sequence itself. Thus, different cells can have very different physical characteristics despite having the same genome. (Cellular differentiation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(10 dec 2010)
A hypothesis to consider seriously, then, is that all our “intrinsic” values started out as instrumental values, and now that their original purpose has lapsed, at least in our eyes, they remain as things we like just because we like them. ()(10 dec 2010)
Specie, like a virus, travels light, and doesn’t carry its own reproductive machinery with it, but, rather, depends for the persistence of its kind on provoking a host (us) to make copies of it using our expensive reproduction machinery (printing presses, stamps and dies). ()(10 dec 2010)
The great evolutionary biologist Francois Jacob once quipped that the dream of every cell is to become two cells. Every time this fission happens, a complete copy of the cell’s genome is copied into the offspring. The parent clones itself, in other words; the resulting organism shares 100 percent of its genes. If you can make perfect genetic copies of yourself, why would you go to the expense of reproducing sexually, which involves not just finding a mate but, much more important, passing on only half of your genes to your offspring? This 50 percent reduction (from the gene’s point of view) is known as the cost of meiosis (the kind of fission that occurs in sex cells, to distinguish it from the cloning fission of mitosis). Something must pay for this cost, and it must pay on delivery, not at some future date, since evolution lacks foresight and cannot approve bargains on the speculative basis of eventual return at some distant time. ()(10 dec 2010)
Lawyers have a stock Latin phrase, cui bono?, which means “Who benefits from this?,” a question that is even more central in evolutionary biology than in the law (Dennett, 1995b). Any phenomenon in the living world that apparently exceeds the functional cries out for explanation. The suspicion is always that we must be missing something, since a gratuitous outlay is, in a word, uneconomical, and as the economists are forever reminding us, there is no such thing as a free lunch. We don’t marvel at an animal doggedly grubbing in the earth with its nose, for we figure it is seeking its food, but if it regularly interrupts its rooting with somersaults, we want to know why. Since accidents do happen, it is always possible that some feature of a living thing that appears to be a pointless excess is just as pointless as it appears (rather than a deep and baffling ploy in some game we don’t understand). But evolution is remarkably efficient at sweeping pointless accidents off the scene, so if we find a persistent pattern of expensive equipment or activity, we can be quite sure that something benefits from it in the only stocktaking that evolution honors: differential reproduction. ()(10 dec 2010)
None of these sugar-related expenditures of time and energy would exist if it weren’t for the bargain that was struck about fifty million years ago between plants blindly “seeking” a way of dispersing their pollinated seeds, and animals similarly seeking efficient sources of energy to fuel their own reproductive projects. There are other ways to get your seeds dispersed, such as windborne gliders and whirligigs, and each method has its associated costs and benefits. Heavy, fleshy fruits full of sugar are a high-investment strategy, but they can have a bonanza payoff: the animal not only carries away the seed, but deposits it on a suitable bit of ground wrapped in a large helping of fertilizer. The strategy almost never works—not even once in a thousand tries—but it only has to work once or twice in the lifetime of a plant for it to replace itself on the planet and keep its lineage going. This is a good example of Mother Nature’s stinginess in the final accounting combined with absurd profligacy in the methods. Not one sperm in a billion accomplishes its life mission—thank goodness—but each is designed and equipped as if everything depended on its success. (Sperm are like e-mail spam, so cheap to make and deliver that a vanishingly small return rate is sufficient to underwrite the project.) ()(10 dec 2010)
but even from afar, a coyote’s track can be readily distinguished from a dog’s—the coyote’s prints fall in an uncannily straight and single-file line, with hind paws in almost perfect registration with forepaws, whereas a dog’s track is typically a mess, as the dog galumphs exuberantly hither and yon, indulging every curious whim (David Brown, 2004). The dog is well fed and knows it will get its supper no matter what, whereas the coyote is on a very tight budget and needs to conserve every calorie for the job at hand: self-preservation. Its methods of locomotion have been ruthlessly optimized for efficiency. But, then, what explains the pack’s characteristic howling? What good accrues to the coyote from that conspicuous expenditure of energy? Hardly a low profile. Doesn’t it serve to scare away their supper and draw their presence to the attention of their own predators? Such costs would not be lightly recouped, one would think. These are good questions. Biologists are working on them, and even though they don’t yet have definitive answers, they are surely right to seek them. Any such pattern of conspicuous outlay demands an accounting. ()(10 dec 2010)
stem cells, pluripotency, and not knowing what kind of life one wants(10 dec 2010)
how w/ the gunk story I keep looking for structural outs, or ways to fragment the thing so that I don't, you know, have to write a coherent story(10 dec 2010)
For instance, does the matter at hand involve elected or appointed officials? Working in the public name? The presumption should run to public review. (Edge 335)(09 dec 2010)
It is important to make a distinction between classification and secrecy. Thanks to digital encryption, it is easier than ever to keep information genuinely secret — between those who hold the keys. Designating something as classified information, however, does not keep it secret; on the contrary, it specifies a class of people with whom it can be shared.
The problem is that as more and more information has been classified, those classes have become very, very large. Apparently (although the amount of classified information is classified information) the United States Government now produces more classified information than unclassified information. Since no information can be useful unless it is shared, we have developed a vast and unwieldy apparatus for sharing classified information.
Any auditory verbal information is assumed to enter automatically into the phonological store. Visually presented language can be transformed into phonological code by silent articulation and thereby be encoded into the phonological store. This transformation is facilitated by the articulatory control process. The phonological store acts as an ‘inner ear’, remembering speech sounds in their temporal order, whilst the articulatory process acts as an ‘inner voice’ and repeats the series of words (or other speech elements) on a loop to prevent them from decaying. The phonological loop may play a key role in the acquisition of vocabulary, particularly in the early childhood years.[3] It may also be vital for learning a second language. (Baddeley’s model of working memory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(09 dec 2010)
Sound reaches the ear and the eardrum vibrates as a whole. This signal has to be analyzed (in some way). The model proposes that sounds will either be heard as “integrated” (heard as a whole — much like harmony in music), or “segregated” into individual components (which leads to counterpoint). For example, a bell can be heard as a ‘single’ sound (integrated), or some people are able to hear the individual components — they are able to segregate the sound. This can be done with chords where it can be heard as a ‘color’, or as the individual notes. In many circumstances the segregated elements can be linked together in time, producing an auditory stream. This ability of auditory streaming can be demonstrated by the so-called cocktail party effect. Up to a point, with a number of voices speaking at the same time or with background sounds, one is able to follow a particular voice even though other voices and background sounds are present. In this example, the ear is segregating this voice from other sounds (which are integrated), and the mind “streams” these segregated sounds into an auditory stream. This is a skill which is highly developed by musicians, notably conductors who are able to listen to one, two, three or more instruments at the same time (segregating them), and following each as an independent line through auditory streaming. Organists also develop this skill having to stream up to five or more voices [parts] at a time.
All old people get plaques and tangles, but what’s different about somebody with Alzheimer’s Disease is that they have many more. If you look at a piece of tissue from a healthy, aged person, and compare it with the brain of a patient who had Alzheimer’s, you’ll find a greater density of plaques in the Alzheimer’s brain. (An interview with Suzanne Corkin: Neurophilosophy)(09 dec 2010)
What they all have in common, he said, is pattern recognition — as he begins filling in a puzzle grid, he starts recognizing what the words are likely to be, even without looking at the clues, based on just a few letters.(09 dec 2010)
nice phrase: "you don't hear many people saying that the Massachusetts health insurance mandate is scary (let alone unconstitutional) because it represents the thin end of the wedge for more restrictions on personal liberty"(08 dec 2010)
You’ve said that you possibly had an American side to you. What is your evidence for this?
HOUELLEBECQ
I have very little proof. There’s the fact that if I lived in an American context, I think I would have chosen a Lexus, which is the best quality for the price. And more obscurely, I have a dog that I know is very popular in the United States, a Welsh Corgi. One thing I don’t share is this American obsession with large breasts. That, I must admit, leaves me cold. But a two-car garage? I want one. A fridge with one of those ice-maker things? I want one too. What appeals to them appeals to me.
You can tell that this is the world that invented capitalism. There are private companies competing to deliver the mail, to collect the garbage. The financial section of the newspaper is much thicker than it is in French papers.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that men and women are more separate. When you go into a restaurant, for example, you often see women eating out together. The French from that point of view are very Latin. A single-sex dinner would be considered boring. In a hotel in Ireland, I saw a group of men talking golf at the breakfast table. They left and were replaced by a group of women who were discussing something else. It’s as if they’re separate species who meet occasionally for reproduction. There was a line I really liked in a novel by Coetzee. One of the characters suspects that the only thing that really interests his lesbian daughter in life is prickly-pear jam. Lesbianism is a pretext. She and her partner don’t have sex anymore, they dedicate themselves to decoration and cooking.
You laugh because the insult claims merely to state the obvious. This may be unusual in literature but it isn’t in private life. “Well, you have to admit, Islam is moronic” is something you could easily say in private. This sort of slightly apologetic statement seems to me a part of French culture. For example, a girl was telling me about a friend who was pretty ugly and was fighting for abortion rights. She was describing their conversation and she said, “I don’t mean to be mean, but nobody would want to get her pregnant anyway.” In conversations the French use that kind of apologetic insult all the time. There’s a common-sense side to it, which I quite like. (Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 206, Michel Houellebecq)(07 dec 2010)
I am persuaded that feminism is not at the root of political correctness. The actual source is much nastier and dares not speak its name, which is simply hatred for old people. The question of domination between men and women is relatively secondary—important but still secondary—compared to what I tried to capture in this novel, which is that we are now trapped in a world of kids. Old kids. The disappearance of patrimonial transmission means that an old guy today is just a useless ruin. The thing we value most of all is youth, which means that life automatically becomes depressing, because life consists, on the whole, of getting old. (Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 206, Michel Houellebecq)(07 dec 2010)
I wake up during the night around one a.m. I write half-awake in a semi-conscious state. Progressively, as I drink coffee, I become more conscious. And I write until I’m sick of it.
I find it an absolute pleasure to read travel guides, especially the Michelin guides, and their description of places I know I’ll probably never visit. I spend a large part of my life reading descriptions of restaurants. I like the vocabulary they use. I like the way they present the world. I love the descriptions of happiness and discovery. And then there are some basic questions I started to ask myself. China in seven days, for instance. How do they choose the different stages? How do they turn the real world into a pleasant, consumable world?
I think that there is a sharp contrast for most people between life at university, where they meet lots of people, and the moment when they enter the workforce, when they basically no longer meet anyone. Life becomes dull. So as a result people get married to have a personal life. I could elaborate but I think everyone understands.
That’s the other part of the trap. The first is professional life, the fact that nothing else is going to happen to you. The second is that now there’s this person who will replace you and who will have experiences. This leads to the natural hatred of the father for his son.
INTERVIEWER
The father and not the mother?
HOUELLEBECQ
Yes. There is some kind of physiological and psychological change in a woman when she gets pregnant. It’s animal biology. But fathers don’t give a shit about their offspring. Hormonal things occur, things that no culture can do anything about, that generally make women like children and men basically not give a damn.
I hadn’t seen any novel make the statement that entering the workforce was like entering the grave. That from then on, nothing happens and you have to pretend to be interested in your work. And, furthermore, that some people have a sex life and others don’t just because some are more attractive than others. I wanted to acknowledge that if people don’t have a sex life, it’s not for some moral reason, it’s just because they’re ugly. Once you’ve said it, it sounds obvious, but I wanted to say it.
"…and a preponderance of people named Big—Big Jim, Big John, Big Tony—not in order to differentiate them from, say, Minor Jim or Small Tony, it was just that they were so goddamned gigantic it was difficult not to mention it."(07 dec 2010)
Jamie is a biostatistician and an epidemiologist who writes papers with titles like Adaptive Nonparametric Confidence Sets: "Consider an observation F(n) distributed according to a law P(n) depending on a parameter θ," and so on. I don't understand it, and I don't need to understand it. What makes sense to me is a man who would rather do his work and eat a jar of mustard for dinner than interrupt himself with a trip to the grocery.(07 dec 2010)
And board votes are rarely
split. Matters are decided in the discussion preceding the vote,
not in the vote itself, which is usually unanimous. But if opinion
is divided in such discussions, the side that knows it would lose
in a vote will tend to be less insistent. That’s what board control
means in practice. You don’t simply get to do whatever you want;
the board still has to act in the interest of the shareholders; but
if you have a majority of board seats, then your opinion about
what’s in the interest of the shareholders will tend to prevail. (Founder Control)(07 dec 2010)
dis·pos·i·tive
Adjective/disˈpäzitiv/
Relating to or bringing about the settlement of an issue or the disposition of property
such litigation will rarely be dispositive of any question
The American inventor and statesman Benjamin Franklin was a street performer. He composed songs, poetry and prose about the current events and went out in public and performed them. He would then sell printed copies of them to the public. He was dissuaded from busking by his father who convinced him the stigmas that some people attach to busking were not worth it. It was this experience that helped form his beliefs in free speech, which he wrote about in his journals. (Street performance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(06 dec 2010)
Article III of the Constitution requires that the courts of the United States preside only over “cases” and “controversies.” In a long line of cases, this has been interpreted to mean that the courts cannot hear a case unless the plaintiff can demonstrate (i) that they have suffered or will likely suffer and actual or imminent injury-in-fact that (ii) is fairly traceable to the conduct of the defendant, and (iii) will likely be redressed by the kind of relief that the plaintiff seeks.(06 dec 2010)
Once completed, we coordinate with air traffic control (ATC) for clearance to push back.
This moment is extremely important, as it’s when we start getting paid. We are hourly workers — if you see a pilot he’s not being paid.(06 dec 2010)
From the boat, Alonso could see one of the shipyards people had always gossiped about in Buenaventura, where submersibles are built out of fiberglass in the jungle, out in the open, to be used for transporting cocaine.
The narcos had developed a reliable system. The boats are almost invisible from the water, and they don’t appear on radar. The only way to reliably locate the vessels is through thermal imaging performed by air surveillance crews. But the drug gangs quickly found a way to overcome this problem. They attached thick pipes to the hulls of the submersibles, allowing exhaust gases to be fed into the water, which cools the gases. A third of the cocaine bound for the US market is now transported with submersibles.
if a tribal human saw a starbucks, he’d probably think it was a kind of medical dispensary(05 dec 2010)
lowercase subject lines signaling earnest somethings from a friend(05 dec 2010)
DFW: I don't know a whole lot about nonfiction, journalism, all this sort of stuff. The way that I think about these things and in terms of what I can do is I almost think of this as kind of a little bit of a service industry, and that essays like this are occasions to watch somebody reasonably bright—but also reasonably average—pay far closer attention, and think at far more length, about all sorts of different stuff, than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives…(05 dec 2010)
Excerpt from Michael Silverblatt's interview with David Foster Wallace in 1999 about Brief Interviews with Hideous Men:
DFW: …how to appear sensitive in the nineties. The nineties skirt chaser now has to affect the kind of Alan Alda-ish sensitivity and almost androgyny as opposed to the machismo of fifteen years ago…
This idea of—not that there's no moral underpinning—but that everything is rhetoricized, and everything has an element of presentation and interpretation and sales pitch, and this mental chess where, before I say the thing, I already scan and triage your possible responses to it, and my responses to those responses, and the portraits we're gonna get of each other from what we're gonna say, such that one reason that I, who have reasonably strong moral beliefs, would never—in a radio show like this—promulgate them, is because half of me is split off and floating and is appallingly aware of what I am going to come off to your listeners as looking like should I promulgate moral beliefs.
Which I do not think vacuums our universe out of the possibility of moral belief, but it puts a spin on things that I—I'm not a great historian, but as far as I can see not since the Sophists, in Athens, has there been this rapacious and effective and widespread rhetoricizing, performance, and review, and me-watching-you-watching-me-watching-you-type metastasis in a vibrant culture.
And that, I think, in a small way is interesting, and in a large way is a tremendous engine of loneliness. And it's something that I think we as a culture are going to have to find a way to deal with.
There: that was almost an earnest moral statement and I feel better for having made it.(04 dec 2010)
dfw, on brief interviews: "I was far more interested in the interlocutor than in the people who are speaking"(04 dec 2010)
Bobby Shaftoe: “…and it’d be a shame if she spent the rest of her life sucking Russian dick at gunpoint.”(04 dec 2010)
I think the elevation of bipartisanship into a small c constitutional principle is wrong. There is no Bipartisanship Clause in the Constitution. Nor is it true that bipartisan initiatives are better as an empirical matter than ones passed on a party-line vote. (Or, at least, I am not aware of any support for that proposition.) Most important, professional politicians are bipartisan only when it is in their partisan interest. That may be because the measure under consideration is popular. It may be because they want political cover for something controversial. These are extraordinary circumstances. Turning that into standard operating procedure, as the modern interpretation of the Senate rules does, is simply unsustainable.(04 dec 2010)
One of the most brilliantly simple and compelling ideas in all
of statistics: to estimate how well your model
will do on new data, take your data set and divide it into two parts at random.
Fit the model to one part and then evaluate its prediction on the other;
average over a couple of splits into training and testing sets. (Cross-Validation)(04 dec 2010)
To date we have visited apart from H.E. The British Ambassador, the Ministries of Immigration, Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Interior, Agriculture, Finance, Education with many of their numerous sub-departments, and Indonesia Radio. As a result, we have achieved a total remission of import duty (on paper - we haven’t yet got the stuff), permission to catch birds of paradise and a plan to fiddle an expedition under Indonesian aegis to catch the dragon (which is permissible). As fast as we hobble over the hurdles, however, new and more formidable ones rise in front of us.
If all we had to do was to bash through jungles and catch a few animals, our lives would be easy.(04 dec 2010)
the pleasure of mishearing a phrase or joke in a way that makes it better than intended(03 dec 2010)
When Tolstoy throws down his decisive thunderbolt against art for aesthetics’ sake—“it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based”—Wallace underlines it emphatically, adding “Art as Empathy” in the margin (while the 9-year-old nods, somewhere, inside). (David Foster Wallace’s Personal Files - Newsweek)(03 dec 2010)
DFW:
The degree of fame we’re talking about here—getting hot as a writer for six
days is equivalent to a fan base of like a local TV weatherman, right? Magazines
are certainly not calling every day to ask me to do stuff anymore, which to be
honest is something of a relief, ‘cause there’s other stuff I’m working on.
I
don’t—see, the thing about it, I’ve been doing this since the mid-’80s. Since
the mid-’80s, I’ve watched, you know, I don’t know how many writers get hot,
and then not get hot, and then get hot again, and then not get hot, and you
just—after a while, you just kind of don’t really take it seriously? A lot of
it is just kind of the peristalsis of the industry.
The
industry I think it’s so pressed, and so anxious to create kind of heat and
buzz around specific people, you know? It’s the same way movies are, the same
way music is. Although the amounts of money at stake in books are vanishingly
small.
DFW:
But that was another, that was a big fight, ‘cause I originally had
“fellatically,” which I thought sounded better, it had more of a
harsh, glottal, fellatiatory sound, and then the copy editor goes, there’s no
such word, we’ve got to say “fellatially,” and I think that sounds
like “palatially,” and I don’t like it. I mean, 48 hours are spent
thumb-wrestling over this bullshit. (Scocca: “I Will Slice Open My Head for You”: David Foster Wallace on Nonfiction, 1998, Part 4)(02 dec 2010)
And
in a way, the footnotes, I think, are better representations of, not really stream-of-consciousness,
but thought patterns and fact patterns. How exactly different readers read
them—I mean, I’ve talked to people who wait and read the footnotes at the end,
or who do them absolutely the way they’re numbered.
I
think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they
are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have
to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.
It
does get to be a problem, though, when I’m like, every single gag that occurs
to me I think I can toss into the thing, and toss it in as a footnote
The
footnotes, the honest thing is, is the footnotes were an intentional,
programmatic part of Infinite Jest, and they get to be kind of—you get sort of
addicted to ‘em. And for me, a lot of those pieces were written around the time
that I was typing and working on Infinite Jest, and so it’s just, it’s a kind
of loopy way of thinking, that it seems to me is in some ways mimetic.
I
don’t know you, but certainly the way I think about things and experience
things is not particularly linear, and it’s not orderly, and it’s not
pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops. Most of the nonfiction pieces are
basically, just, look, I’m not a great journalist, and I can’t interview anybody,
but what I can do is kind of, I will slice open my head for you. And let you
see a cross-section of just a kind of average, averagely bright person’s head
at this thing.
DFW:
I don’t know. I think it’s—the accurate answer is the vague one. Sometimes it’s
fairly easy. And other times it isn’t. I think a very interesting case of this
is Don DeLillo, who I think does the best dialogue like of anybody alive.
And
if you read DeLillo dialogue, it’s funny, because it sounds very real and very
natural, but if you go back and look at it, it’s really not. You know, it’s
kind of like, um, there will be a line where somebody says, “I’m only
saying.” And then there’s the next line, so your eye’s got to track over
the right space and then go down to the next line, and there’s a much longer
pause than in a real conversation, when, if you and I are having an argument,
and I’d say, “I’m only sayin’—” and then you cut me off?
Q:
Mm-hm.
DFW:
I don’t know it making any sense. So in a way, it really isn’t, it isn’t
natural at all. And I think it’s a very kind of affected, arty thing to do. The
trick, though, is when the reader gets reading quickly, and there’s kind of
that brain voice starts? Like somebody talking to you? It ends up sounding very
natural. And that’s something that seems to me to be very interesting.
DFW:
Aaah. I think it’s the ultimate nerd fantasy movie. I think it’s a bit of a
fairy tale, but I enjoyed it a lot, and Minnie Driver is really to fall
sideways for.
And
there’s all kinds of cool stuff. It’s actually a movie that’s got calculus in it,
you know. Takes place in Boston. There’s all kinds of—one guy I talked to who
saw it described it as a cross between Ordinary People and The Computer Wore
Tennis Shoes, which I thought was kind of funny. And if you see it, you’ll see,
that’s not un-germane. [Chuckles.]
DFW: So you know what I mean, then, about like Harper’s, you know, the editors, actually, some of the time, make your stuff better in the cuts. You just, you get real attached to ‘em. ‘Cause it’s so easy to mangle. Or like, oh, we want to put in another Gap ad, let’s cut four paragraphs. That stuff just makes you upset.
Q: How do you handle being responsible for facts, writing nonfiction, after writing fiction? Coming to a genre where the things you say have to be on some level verifiably true?
DFW: That’s a real good question. And the first one of these that I did, in order, the first one I did was the very first one, about playing tennis as a Midwesterner. Where I had some shit that I just, that was like impressionistic, and I didn’t know, and I’d never dealt with a fact-checker before. And they’re like, “We discovered there is no yacht and tennis club in Aurora, Illinois, what are we to do?” And I was like, oh, God.
Q: How many words was the original version of the title essay? And how many hours of work did that represent? Hours of writing time.
DFW: I don’t know how many words. I mean, I remember, I always try to fool the magazine editors by sending stuff in with like single spaced and eight-point font.
Q: How do the different kinds of writing differ for you, fiction versus nonfiction?
DFW: Oh, Lord. Is this an aesthetic question, a process question?
Q: Aesthetic, process, intellectual.
DFW: Golly. You know, the weird thing about the nonfiction is, I don’t really think, I mean, I’m not a journalist, and I don’t pretend to be one, and most of the pieces in there were assigned to me by Harper’s, with these sort of maddening instructions of, you know, just go to a certain spot and kind of, you know, turn 350 degrees a few times and tell us what you see.
And so there’s a kind of vagueness about the assignment and a kind of, it’s more—I’m not being very articulate. I’ll be honest. I think of myself as a fiction writer. I’m real interested in fiction, and all elements of fiction. Fiction’s more important to me. So I’m also I think more scared and tense about fiction, more worried about my stuff, more worried about whether I’m any good or not, or I’m on the wrong track or not.
Whereas the thing that was fun about a lot of the nonfiction is, you know, it’s not that I didn’t care, but it was just mostly like, yeah, I’ll try this. I’m not an expert at it. I don’t pretend to be. It’s not particularly important to me whether the magazine, you know, even takes the thing I do or not. And so it was just more, I guess the nonfiction seems a lot more like play. For me.
"there's just something about…"… what is the something? articulate it. work harder.(02 dec 2010)
how I usually regret using discretionary italics (i.e., italics that aren't strictly required)(02 dec 2010)
Charlie Young: Actually, I think it's a bad time in a person's life to stop showing up at places they say they're gonna show up.(01 dec 2010)
We can extend these ideas to a more realistic cryptography application. In this scenario, Peggy knows a Hamiltonian cycle for a large graph, G. Victor knows G but not the cycle (e.g., Peggy has generated G and revealed it to him.) Peggy will prove that she knows the cycle without revealing it. A Hamiltonian cycle in a graph is just one way to implement a zero knowledge proof; in fact any NP-complete problem can be used, as well as some other difficult problems such as factoring.[2] However, Peggy does not want to simply reveal the Hamiltonian cycle or any other information to Victor; she wishes to keep the cycle secret (perhaps Victor is interested in buying it but wants verification first, or maybe Peggy is the only one who knows this information and is proving her identity to Victor). (Zero-knowledge proof - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(01 dec 2010)
A zero-knowledge proof must satisfy three properties:
Completeness: if the statement is true, the honest verifier (that is, one following the protocol properly) will be convinced of this fact by an honest prover.
Soundness: if the statement is false, no cheating prover can convince the honest verifier that it is true, except with some small probability.
Zero-knowledge: if the statement is true, no cheating verifier learns anything other than this fact.
One of my favorite recent papers on the insula was this study of cigarette smokers: It turned out that smokers with a damaged insula were 136 times more likely to quit than control subjects. The reason, according to the scientists, returns us to the function of the insula, which is to monitor the intersection of flesh and feeling. It detects the bodily changes associated with smoking – the escalated pulse, the slow inhalation, the slight nicotine rush – and combines those physical sensations with the idea of a cigarette.(01 dec 2010)
"statecraft" is a nice word (for diplomatic politicking)(01 dec 2010)
agitprop: Political (originally communist) propaganda, esp. in art or literature(01 dec 2010)
the way you play your last life in a platformer, vs. the way you play when flush(30 nov 2010)
By the same standard, you sometimes need a vacation to recover from a vacation if the original vacation involved meeting family expectations. I am sure that’s especially true for many Americans who are returning after stressful family weekends. That’s a “work” vacation because between the turkey and the pumpkin pie, you may have had to justify your career/life to your Dad, and the reaction mattered. If this is true for you, then for better or worse, your Dad is your customer for a product you are creating called “my life.”(30 nov 2010)
I’ll say that from my end of
the interview, I often have a guest whose subject I happen to know a thing or
two about, and I want to engage them intelligently, but I am an aggressively
ignorant character. That is frustrating. Of course knowing their subject
lets me make the dumbest possible characterizations of their position or
idea. If you ever see me truly being vigorously dense with a guest, I
probably know something of his or her subject. (Stephen Colbert has answered your questions: IAmA)(30 nov 2010)
When you are young and single, there really isnt anything to worry about.
Will you starve? Not likely. I worried that I didnt have enough gumption to
get work. That I wouldn’t know how to network or something. But at a young
age several people, some professors and directors, told me I had talent, and
that it was mine to husband if I was willing to work. Those kind words
sustained me, many times.
I mostly just said yes to any opportunity to get on stage. Pay or no pay.
Equity, amateur, comedy, avant garde, and improv especially. Chicago
has a great improv community, and I could get up on stage a lot after I
got to know the other members of the community. I called it getting in
trouble. You say yes to something, then you are in trouble. You have to
deliver. Each mini-crisis I forced myself into made me work hard.
As Dewey puts it: “The product of art — temple, painting, statue, poem — is not the work of art. The work takes place when a human being cooperates with the product(30 nov 2010)
John Updike: I don’t think I can aspire to the particular sheen of Nabokov’s brilliance. There is a sense of wordplay that if I tried it that much it would be I think distracting. Writing is trying hard to do two things, as I see it. One is to be entertaining in itself. Any page of good prose has something of the quality of a poem. It’s interesting in itself even if you don’t know the story or quite what you’re reading. It has a kind of abstract dynamism. But also it is trying to deliver images and a story to a reader, so in that sense it should be kind of invisible. And I think I’m a little more invisible than Nabokov is. But the beauty and the comedy, and the poignancy often, of his prose, are something I’m happy to imitate if I can. (Guernica / Updike Redux)(30 nov 2010)
Lila Azam Zanganeh: Do you read in the afternoon?
John Updike: You know, I should; that’s a good idea. Maybe now the winter’s here, or almost here, I will. But I sort of have other things to do. You’re sort of sick of words by the time you have your writing day done. And I live on a few acres—there’s always outdoor work to do. I try to play golf about twice a week, and there are various errands so that the day tends to get used up by the writing first, and then the other activities. So I don’t really settle to reading until the evening. So I read rather less than I should, and certainly a lot less than a lot of New York intellectuals do. They’re the ones who—somebody like Richard Howard really reads a lot! [Laughs] I read, you know, maybe a book a week, on average.
I’m not fast. Because it depends on the prose, of course. You can read some prose faster than others. But in general the kind of prose I enjoy is prose that should be savored and read fairly slowly. I think of a page a minute as being a reasonable pace. But some prose, some big pages take more than that.
John Updike: I think any training in art, and any aspiration to be an artist, you do learn to look at things a little better, a little differently. And when you try to paint realistically you realize how complicated and elusive the visual world is—you know, what is that shadow? what color is it?—that kind of thing. So, yeah, I suppose it makes your inner vision as you try to conceive of faces and rooms and themes and costumes, and makes all this a little—what?—a little more meaningful to you as you write. Joseph Conrad famously said that the object of the writer is to make us see. And he, at his best, certainly does that. And Nabokov almost always gives us images to contemplate, images to see—a brilliant visual sense and ebullient, brilliant use of visual metaphor. Just offhand, there’s an image in one of the books—with a German background—of a lawn sprinkler waltzing with a rainbow in its arms. That is so apropos and funny and accurate, that [it] knocks your breath out of you.
I think there is a rapture in Nabokov, which you can take to be a love of life, and also a love of consciousness; a love of the motions of the mind as it deals with whatever (Guernica / Updike Redux)(30 nov 2010)
nostrums
plural
A medicine, esp. one that is not considered effective, prepared by an unqualified person
A pet scheme or favorite remedy, esp. one for bringing about some social or political reform or improvement
Throughout the latter half of the last century, many of our most talented novelists—Nabokov, Gaddis, Bellow, Pynchon, DeLillo, Wallace—carved out for themselves a cultural position that depended precisely on a combination of public and academic acclaim. Such writers were readable enough to become famous yet large and knotty enough to require professional explanation—thus securing an afterlife, and an aftermarket, for their lives’ work. Syntactical intricacy, narrative ambiguity, formal innovation, and even length were aids to canonization, feeding the university’s need for books against which students and professors could test and prove their interpretive skills. Canonization, in turn, contributed to public renown. Thus the ambitious novelist, writing with one eye on the academy and the other on New York, could hope to secure a durable readership without succumbing (at least not fully) to the logic of the blockbuster. It was a strategy shaped by, and suited to, the era of the English department, which valued scholarly interpretation over writerly imitation, the long novel over the short story. (MFA vs. NYC: America now has two distinct literary cultures. Which one will last? - By Chad Harbach - Slate Magazine)(28 nov 2010)
The MFA system also nudges the writer toward the writing of short stories; of all the ambient commonplaces about MFA programs, perhaps the only accurate one is that the programs are organized around the story form. This begins in workshops, both MFA and undergraduate, where the minute, scrupulous attentions of one’s instructor and peers are best suited to the consideration of short pieces, which can be marked up, cut down, rewritten and reorganized, and brought back for further review. The short story, like the 10-page college term paper, or the 25-page graduate paper, has become a primary pedagogical genre form.
The rate of violent crime among Native Americans is twice the national average (PDF); on some reservations, it’s 20 times higher. At least one in three American Indian women will be raped (PDF) in their lifetimes. Yet just 3,000 tribal and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officers—the only kinds of cops with jurisdiction on Indian land—patrol 56 million acres. In 2008, the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas had nine officers for 9,000 people in an area twice the size of Delaware. (A typical town with the same population has three times that number.) Tribal courts can only prosecute misdemeanors such as petty theft and public intoxication. They can’t issue sentences longer than one year without meeting special criteria, and even then, three years is the maximum. More serious crimes must be handled by federal prosecutors, who turn down 65 percent (PDF) of the reservation cases referred to them.
Non-Indians commit two-thirds of violent crimes against Indians, including 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults. Yet thanks to a 1978 Supreme Court ruling, tribes can not prosecute outsiders who commit crimes on their land.
like the way professional blitz players move their pieces(28 nov 2010)
a feedback cycle in which professional writers improve because they're forced to work under deadlines(28 nov 2010)
how analogy posts are bunk, in a way, because of how they exploit these selection effects. so that you build your analogical map using only the features you choose, excluding anything that breaks the correspondence and highlighting only those pieces that can be appropriately massaged.
example: startups as instances of the helicopter game (default condition = failure; random block obstacles, but not much difficulty increment - it's the steady fight that counts; some draws are unbeatable; the satisfaction of accumulation, and the exhaustion of trying to match one's longest best).(28 nov 2010)
you can't have insights without first immersing yourself in an ugly mass of raw material(28 nov 2010)
Pareidolia – a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) is perceived as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.(26 nov 2010)
Reactance – the urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice.(26 nov 2010)
example of higher-level perception as analogy-making: seeing a chair as a chair, rather than as a collection of raw materials, or a mere shape, or a mere set of hues and shadows… so the chunk of leather here plays the same role - armrest - here as the piece of wood did there.(26 nov 2010)
Heraclitus of Ephesus (Ancient Greek: Ἡράκλειτος ὁ Ἐφέσιος — Hērákleitos ho Ephésios; c. 535–c. 475 BCE) was a pre-SocraticGreek philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom. From the lonely life he led, and still more from the riddling nature of his philosophy and his contempt for humankind in general, he was called “The Obscure,” and the “Weeping Philosopher.”
Heraclitus is famous for his doctrine of change being central to the universe, as stated in his famous saying, “You cannot step twice into the same river.” He believed in the unity of opposites, stating that “the path up and down are one and the same,” existing things being characterized by pairs of contrary properties, and other explorations of the concept of dualism. His cryptic utterance that “all things come to be in accordance with this Logos,” (literally, “word,” “reason,” or “account”) has been the subject of numerous interpretations.
Ludibrium is a word derived from Latinludus (plural ludi), meaning a plaything or a trivial game. In Latin ludibrium denotes an object of fun, and at the same time, of scorn and derision, and it also denotes a capricious game itself: e.g., ludibria ventis (Virgil), “the playthings of the winds”, ludibrium pelagis (Lucretius), “the plaything of the waves”; Ludibrio me adhuc habuisti (Plautus), “Until now you have been toying with me.”
The term “ludibrium” was used frequently by Johann Valentin Andreae (1587 - 1654) in phrases like “the ludibrium of the fictitious Rosicrucian Fraternity”
In the nineteenth century there were many books and articles about the possible inhabitants of other planets. Many people believed that intelligent beings might live on the Moon, Mars, and Venus; but since travel to other planets was not yet possible, some people suggested ways to signal the extraterrestrials even before radio was discovered.
Carl Friedrich Gauss suggested that a giant triangle and three squares, the Pythagoras, could be drawn on the Siberian tundra. The outlines of the shapes would have been ten-mile wide strips of pine forest, the interiors could be rye or wheat.
Recently, Christian G. Sprecht, a neurobiologist, wrote an intriguing piece in The Scientist about how scientific citations — references by one paper to previous ones — mutate over time. What Sprecht meant by this is that over time, a popular paper, instead of being read and cited directly, gets cited by looking at other citations. This somewhat lazy approach is unfortunately all too common, and if a scientist types it wrong, then suddenly there is a mutated version out there, that other scientists reference, leading to a proliferation of errors. By studying these mutations you can learn about the history of the article that is being cited. (Mutated Manuscripts: The Evolution of Genes and Texts - Samuel Arbesman - Technology - The Atlantic)(22 nov 2010)
Playing against a computer, you will do best in the early middle game and then progressively fall apart as its combinatorial powers destroy you.(22 nov 2010)
Jane intended to let the man in the delivery uniform into her house.—True. Jane intended to let the Westside rapist into her house.—False. Jane intended to let Norman Heathcliff into her house.—False. Jane intended to let the man on the porch into her house.—True.
But the four descriptions all refer to the same man. Because you cannot substitute referentially equivalent descriptions into expressions of intentions, we say that such expressions are “referentially opaque” or that they are “intensional” contexts. (Notice again that intensional was spelled with an “s”.)(22 nov 2010)
struthious: like an ostrich or other ratite. (head buried?)(22 nov 2010)
There are many possible causes of a high level of income inequality. The historically most typical cause is the concentration of political power in the hands of a predatory elite. This is the main explanation for the typically high levels of Latin American income inequality. This is not the main explanation for the high levels of income inequality in the United States and Great Britain. The main explanation for widening income gaps in wealthy, advanced liberal democracies is a complicated combination of (1) increasing economic returns to the acquisition of high levels of skill; (2) low supply of highly-skilled workers relative to demand; (3) changes in the way executives are paid, and in the norms governing executive pay; (4) technology-driven magnification of top rewards in “winner-take-all” or “superstar” markets; and (5) relatively low political demand for higher levels of progressive redistribution. (Inequality and plutocracy: This ain’t no banana republic | The Economist)(22 nov 2010)
ceti as an even trickier version of calvinball / gnomic - a game where the object is to (a) realize that you're playing, and (b) to make up the rules(22 nov 2010)
this is bullshit:
That’s like saying to somebody, “What about the way that you just kissed me was good?” If you have to explain, it wasn’t good.
One of the more unusual and sobering press conferences I participated in last year was the release of a report by a group of top retired generals and admirals. Here was the stunning conclusion of their report: 75 percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit.” (Teaching for America - NYTimes.com)(21 nov 2010)
this worries me:
“Megamind,” from DreamWorks Animation, offers the latest evidence that 3-D cartoon features, in addition to representing the most reliably lucrative kind of movie, are also the most sophisticated. DreamWorks, in particular, has made the kind of allusive, parodic cultural self-consciousness that used to be called postmodernism safe for the whole family. “Megamind,” like the “Shrek” movies, subjects age-old archetypes (in this case the ubiquitous mythology of superheroes and villains) to tweaking and mockery without entirely undermining the sentimental comforts of the genre.
…
The epic battle between good and evil is more a game than an allegory: that the stakes in the fight are so low is part of the fun, even though your emotional investment in the story is correspondingly modest.
The most interesting part of #1 is Dutton’s discussion of the Acheulean flake, what he claims as the earliest form of art. These flakes - teardrops of stone, basically - showed up all over the place about 2 million years ago. That’s one big surprise, because it suggests Homo erectus had an innate faculty for making them. The other big surprises are (a) that they’re symmetrical, and (b) that their sharp edges weren’t usually worn down. Both features suggest they weren’t so much used as tools as they were admired for their aesthetic beauty and the skill required to make them.
Also, “Acheulean flake” has a great ring to it.(20 nov 2010)
Back in the mid-1950s, he was employed by Sports Illustrated, briefly. He reported to work, was asked to write a short piece on a racehorse that had jumped over a fence and tried to run away. Kurt stared at the blank piece of paper all morning and then typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and walked out, self-employed again.(20 nov 2010)
The story is revealed when we look at cash flows rather than balance sheets. During the year, all of the financial diary households pushed and pulled through financial instruments amounts far greater than their year-end net worth… We use the expression “turnover” to mean the total sum of money being “pushed” and “pulled”… The high level of financial activity is particularly surprising when considered in relation to income. We might call this ratio the “cash flow intensity of income”:… In India, households shifted, on average, between 0.75 and 1.75 times their incomes, with high-velocity money movers like rural small traders shifting more than three times their earnings in an average month…. In South Africa, the poorer half of the households turned over a bigger multiple of their income than the richer half… This attests to our general notion that lower incomes require more rather than less active financial management.
When I read this analysis, the thought that popped into my head was “ants versus elephants.” Ants can lift many times their body weight, while elephants can only lift 4-5% (300-500kg). Yet we think of elephants as the heavy lifters. The scale difference also causes qualitative differences: ants can walk or water or get trapped in a droplet, due to the effect of surface tension at their scale. The poor, similarly, have to deal with “surface tension” type phenomena that simply don’t affect you and me, given the scale of our financial lives (there’s an interesting “hydrodynamics of money” theory lurking here).(18 nov 2010)
Even his book’s title, “The Bed of Procrustes,” is intentionally harsh. As he reminds readers in a brief introduction, the Procrustes of Greek mythology was the cruel and ill-advised fool who stretched or shortened people to make them fit his inflexible bed. Mr. Taleb’s new book addresses the latter-day ways in which “we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences.” (‘The Bed of Procrustes’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - NYTimes.com)(18 nov 2010)
how s’s barber started at 30 mins and got down to 15, having learned his “lines”(17 nov 2010)
what would hofstafter say about twitter? “constraints drive creativity” or “that’s some frivolous self-important brain candy”?(17 nov 2010)
Context: “Early in January Eliot returned to London, after spending a few days in Paris, where he submitted the manuscript of The Waste Land to Pound’s maieutic skill.”
ma·ieu·tic
Adjective/mäˈyo͞otik/
Of or denoting the Socratic mode of inquiry, which aims to bring a person’s latent ideas into clear consciousness
cavil = a petty or unnecessary objection. also a verb.(17 nov 2010)
I have often stressed the point to my students: it is not your ignorance that interferes with your education in this subject; it’s the very opposite. It’s the fact that you are a highly intelligent human being and you know many things deeply and thoroughly that can prevent your learning. Of the things I teach, it is in phonetics that this comes out most vividly: the reason you can’t learn to hear and produce the difference between Hindi dental [t] and retroflex [ʈ], I tell them, is not that you are no good at this practical phonetics stuff, but that you have had twenty years of training in ignoring this contrast (so as to become an expert speaker of English or some other language), and you have done brilliantly at it.(17 nov 2010)
when reading I seem to gloss over comma-separated lists(17 nov 2010)
Physicalists say things like- look everything supervenes on the physical! And non-physicalists say things like- look there are things that cannot be well-explained by physical accounts. Now somehow these two people often act like they are disagreeing when they say these things. It’s very unclear why. All physicalists will be perfectly willing to grant that talking about patterns of activity of fundamental physical constituents is a poor explanatory device for a huge variety of phenomena. Physicalist’s who are being attentive will probably also note that supervenience does not entail even in-principle-explainability.(16 nov 2010)
In fact, “I hate to be the one to tell you this” (like its cousin, “I hate to say it”) is one of them. Think back: How many times have you seen barely suppressed glee in someone who — ostensibly — couldn’t be more reluctant to be the bearer of bad news? A lack of respect from someone who starts off “With all due respect”? A stunning dearth of comprehension from someone who prefaces their cluelessness with “I hear what you’re saying”? And has “I’m not a racist, but…” ever introduced an unbiased statement?
These contrary-to-fact phrases have been dubbed (by the Twitter user GrammarHulk and others) “but-heads,” because they’re at the head of the sentence, and usually followed by but. They’ve also been dubbed “false fronts,” “wishwashers,” and, less cutely, “lying qualifiers.”(16 nov 2010)
philosophy as thinking obsessed with clarity(15 nov 2010)
ey: "I love it when they put the customer copy on top, because that's an automatic one-dollar tip deduction"(15 nov 2010)
what can I get you fellers ta swallarh?(15 nov 2010)
j commenting that dilbert is the show he likes most relative to its (perceived, public) quality, and how the inverse, for me, is gran torino.
netflix can make this idea precise, by spitting out the films for which our ratings are maximally different from the public's.(15 nov 2010)
how a micro-audience shapes / constrains / elevates one's thinking(15 nov 2010)
the median voter theorem is just like the ice-cream-vendors-on-a-beach problem(14 nov 2010)
Because macro calls can expand into further
macro calls, you can generate massively complex expressions with
them— code you would have had to write by hand otherwise. And yet
programs built up out of layers of macros turn out to be very
manageable. I wouldn’t be surprised if some parts of my code go
through 10 or 20 levels of macroexpansion before the compiler sees
them, but I don’t know, because I’ve never had to look. ()(13 nov 2010)
Building up expressions using calls to list and cons can get unwieldy,
so most Lisp dialects have an abbreviation called backquote that
makes generating lists easier.
If you put a single open-quote character (`) before an expression,
it turns off evaluation just like the ordinary quote (‘) does,
arc> `(a b c)
(a b c)
except that if you put a comma before an expression within the list,
evaluation gets turned back on for that expression.
arc> (let x 2
`(a ,x c))
(a 2 c)
A backquoted expression is like a quoted expression with holes in it.
You can also put a comma-at (,@) in front of anything within a
backquoted expression, and in that case its value (which must be a
list) will get spliced into whatever list you’re currently in.
arc> (let x ‘(12)
`(a ,@x c))
(a 12 c)
With backquote we can make the definition of when more readable.
(mac when (test . body)
`(if ,test (do ,@body)))
In fact, this is the definition of when in the Arc source. ()(13 nov 2010)
Since functions of one argument are so often used in Lisp programs,
Arc has a special notation for them. [… _ …] is an abbreviation
for (fn (_) (… _ …)). So our first map example could have been
written
arc> (map [+ _ 10] ‘(12 3))
(111213)
Removing variables is a particularly good way to make programs
shorter. An unnecessary variable increases the conceptual load of
a program by more than just what it adds to the length.
You can compose functions by putting a colon between the names.
I.e. (foo:bar x y) is equivalent to (foo (bar x y)). Composed
functions are convenient as arguments.
The subject matter, the grade level, the college, the course—these things are irrelevant to me. Prices are determined per page and are based on how long I have to complete the assignment. As long as it doesn’t require me to do any math or video-documented animal husbandry, I will write anything. (The Shadow Scholar - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education)(13 nov 2010)
A few years ago, I was chatting with a stranger in a bar. When I told
him I was an economist, he said, “Ah. So… what are the Two Things about
economics?”
“Huh?” I cleverly replied.
“You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only
two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application
of those two things, or just not important.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives
matter. Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
Ever since that evening, I’ve been playing the Two Things game.
The term bottle episode or bottleneck episode is used in episodictelevision to refer to episodes which are produced using the least money. The majority of a television series’ budget generally goes into producing episodes meant to pique audience interest, such as season openers and closers; bottle episodes are produced using whatever money is left over. Most bottle episodes are shot on sets already built for other episodes, frequently the main interior sets for a series, and they consist largely of dialogue or scenes for which no special preparations are needed. An often parodied feature of bottle episodes among series that are rarely studio based is the means in which the cast are forced to stay in the same location, for example large external forces such as natural disasters (not seen on screen due to the expense) or something as simple as an accidentally locked door. (Bottle episode - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(13 nov 2010)
want a quick single word for "cognitive load" / "cognitive burden". candidates:
Unfortunately, this argument is fatal if a court were to fully investigate what constituted the Second Amendment’s “well-regulated militia” as the Founders understood it. The right to “keep and bear arms” in a “well-regulated militia” was not a license to individually train or discharge firearms. What constituted a “well-regulated militia” was a carefully planned constitutional military force controlled by the State and federal governments. This fact was frequently conveyed in militia law preambles. Even the infamous Massachusetts militia that assembled at Lexington & Concord was a well-regulated and disciplined force that had been performing military exercises for a year. Not to mention, there is a long chain of historical evidence that counters the assertion that the individual exercise of arms is what accomplishes the Second Amendment’s purpose. It is well-documented that the Founding Fathers did not equate a random assemblage of armed people as comprising a “well-regulated militia,” and instead viewed this assemblage as a dangerous mob.(12 nov 2010)
Before World War II, Americans ate massive amounts of potatoes, largely baked, boiled or mashed. They were generally consumed at home. French fries were rare, both at home and in restaurants, because the preparation of French fries requires significant peeling, cutting and cooking. Without expensive machinery, these activities take a lot of time.
In the postwar period, a number of innovations allowed the centralization of French fry production. French fries are now typically peeled, cut and cooked in a few central locations using sophisticated new technologies. They are then frozen at -40 degrees and shipped to the point of consumption, where they are quickly reheated either in a deep fryer (in a fast food restaurant), in an oven or even a microwave (at home).
Today, the French fry is the dominant form of potato and America’s favorite vegetable. This change shows up in consumption data. From 1977 to 1995, total potato consumption increased by about 30 percent, accounted for almost exclusively by increased consumption of potato chips and French fries.(12 nov 2010)
Unix has wired into it an assumption that the programmer knows
best. It doesn’t stop you or request confirmation when you do
dangerous things with your own data, like issuing rm -rf
*. On the other hand, Unix is rather careful about not
letting you step on other people’s data. In fact, Unix encourages you
to have multiple accounts, each with its own attached and possibly
differing privileges, to help you protect yourself from misbehaving
programs. (The Elements of Operating-System Style)(11 nov 2010)
Lisp code is made out of Lisp data objects. And not in the trivial
sense that the source files contain characters, and strings are
one of the data types supported by the language. Lisp code, after
it’s read by the parser, is made of data structures that you can
traverse.
If you understand how compilers work, what’s really going on is
not so much that Lisp has a strange syntax as that Lisp has no
syntax. You write programs in the parse trees that get generated
within the compiler when other languages are parsed. But these
parse trees are fully accessible to your programs. You can write
programs that manipulate them. In Lisp, these programs are called
macros. They are programs that write programs. (Beating the Averages)(11 nov 2010)
The same thing will happen if you’re running a startup, of course.
If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should
expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance
means that you’ll go out of business. The survival rate for startups
is way less than fifty percent. So if you’re running a startup,
you had better be doing something odd. If not, you’re in trouble. (Beating the Averages)(11 nov 2010)
Back in 1995, we knew something that I don’t think our competitors
understood, and few understand even now: when you’re writing
software that only has to run on your own servers, you can use
any language you want. When you’re writing desktop software,
there’s a strong bias toward writing applications in the same
language as the operating system. Ten years ago, writing applications
meant writing applications in C. But with Web-based software,
especially when you have the source code of both the language and
the operating system, you can use whatever language you want. (Beating the Averages)(11 nov 2010)
I’ve found in my long career as a slob that
cruft breeds cruft, and I’ve seen this happen in software as
well as under beds and in the corners of rooms. (The Hundred-Year Language)(11 nov 2010)
The force of a constitution, like the force of all enacted law, derives, in significant part, from the circumstances of its enactment. Legal and political theory have long recognized the logical necessity of a “constituent power.” That recognition, however, tells us little about what is necessary for the successful enactment of an enduring constitution. Long term acceptance of a constitution requires a continuing regard for the process that brought it into being. There must be, that is, recognition of the “constituent authority” of the constitution-makers.(11 nov 2010)
As I said at the time, his experience of living in Indonesia from age six to ten had left him “if not bilingual, at least bi-courteous.”(11 nov 2010)
Perhaps I’ve been inured to this sense of a fallen English language because I’ve rooted around in the history of technology. I’ve read telegraphs between figures who were decidedly non-literary and engineers’ papers. If your vision of the past language is mostly Melville — the stuff that’s endured — then, yeah, English seems like it’s in damn sorry shape. But if it includes all those other low and middle-brow writings, the bad letters, the telegraphs, the stupid poems, you end up with a spikier, less formal take on language. (Literary Writers and Social Media: A Response to Zadie Smith - Technology - The Atlantic)(10 nov 2010)
So, take a look at the video. I hope it captured some of the feeling of flying over this landscape. Fallows has a Goldilocks theory that the 2,000 foot-view of small-plane flight is special. On a road, down on the ground, you don’t have a proper sense of scale because you’re too close. But from a commercial airliner, you’re so high that all the land becomes abstract patterns. It’s only a few thousand feet up where you can see large-scale land deformations for what they really are. Quarries, suburbs, coal mines. You can grasp them from that sweet spot in the air.(10 nov 2010)
But something else happened in the year of the
AT&T divestiture that would have more long-term importance for
Unix. A programmer/linguist named Larry Wall quietly invented the
patch(1)
utility. The patch program, a simple tool
that applies changebars generated by
diff(1)
to a base file, meant that Unix developers could cooperate by passing
around patch sets — incremental changes to code — rather
than entire code files. This was important not only because patches
are less bulky than full files, but because patches would often apply
cleanly even if much of the base file had changed since the
patch-sender fetched his copy. With this tool, streams of development
on a common source-code base could diverge, run in parallel, and
re-converge. The patch program did more
than any other single tool to enable collaborative development over
the Internet — a method that would revitalize Unix after
1990. (Origins and History of Unix, 1969-1995)(10 nov 2010)
So then, what is Lisp?
Well, it is a sort of tree that lives and thrives in an artificial world, and are consumed by these creatures called Evals (pronounced roughly like “eh-vulz” as in “bevels”) and, unlike the natural process of digestion here on Earth, the Evals give us back another tree (depending on the environment it’s in).
what would it be like to have an extra pair of eyes on the back of my head? (having just one eye I can imagine; being blind I can sort of imagine; having just two eyes on the back of my head I can (trivially) imagine; but having four eyes, two front and two back - that just seems incoherent (ie. incompatible with the way I feel my mind to work. for instance: how could I attend to two different focal points simultaneously?), and I can’t imagine it. Is that (merely) a failure of my imagination?)
what would it take for my "I" to feel like your "I"?
could someone just feed me your sense-data? how would they do it? wouldn't they need to change stuff in my brain, too, or could they just hack my retinas? what does the theory of sensorimotor contingencies have to say about it?(09 nov 2010)
Data is more tractable than program logic. It follows that where
you see a choice between complexity in data structures and
complexity in code, choose the former. More: in evolving a design,
you should actively seek ways to shift complexity from code to
data. (Basics of the Unix Philosophy)
(e.g., a big undifferentiated blob of text and a complicated parser vs. json and a trivial parser)(08 nov 2010)
This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one
thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write
programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal
interface. (Basics of the Unix Philosophy)(08 nov 2010)
(i) Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build
afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new
features.
(ii) Expect the output of every program to become the input to
another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with
extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input
formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.
(iii) Design and build software, even operating systems, to be
tried early, ideally within weeks. Don’t hesitate to throw away the
clumsy parts and rebuild them.
(iv) Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a
programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and
expect to throw some of them out after you’ve finished using
them.
Alas, people sometimes use crooked or biased coins, either knowingly or in an attempt to cheat others.
To obtain a fair result from a biased coin, the mathematician John von
Neumann devised the following trick. He advised the two parties involved
to flip the coin twice. If it comes up heads both times or tails both
times, they are to flip the coin two more times.
If it comes up H-T, the first party will be declared the winner, while
if it comes up T-H, the second party is declared the winner. The
probabilities of both these latter events (H-T and T-H) are the same
because the coin flips are independent even if the coin is biased.
For example, if the coin lands heads 70 percent of the time and tails 30
percent of the time, an H-T sequence has probability .7 x .3 = .21
while a T-H sequence has probability .3 x .7 = .21. So 21 percent of the
time the first party wins, 21 percent of the time the second party
wins, and the other 58 percent of the time when H-H or T-T comes up, the
coin is flipped two more times.
The kind of people who become programmers and
developers have ‘fun’ when the effort they have to put out
to do a task challenges them, but is just within their
capabilities. ‘Fun’ is therefore a sign of peak
efficiency. (What Unix Gets Right)(08 nov 2010)
This tenet was firmly established at Bell Labs by Dick
Hamming[5] who insisted in
the 1950s when computers were rare and expensive, that open-shop
computing, where customers wrote their own programs, was imperative,
because “it is better to solve the right problem the wrong way
than the wrong problem the right way”.
an interesting phenomenon I first heard coined by Jason Roberts of TechZing fame (a podcast I highly recommend for tech entrepreneurs): “Luck Surface Area”. As I understand it, Jason believes that by putting yourself out there… blogging, podcasting, commenting in online discussions, and following up with every customer and user, you increase the likelihood of having a serendipitous moment. (Making the Front Page of HN Without Even Trying «Beyond Page 99)(08 nov 2010)
“The famous ‘obedience experiments’ conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram beginning in the early 1960s tested whether average citizens would inflict harm on another person under instruction from an authority figure. Milgram and his staff asked participants to deliver a series of progressively intense electric shocks each time a man answered a word problem incorrectly. Before this experiment, leading psychiatrists predicted that fewer than 1 percent of participants would be willing to administer shocks at dangerous levels. As it turned out, half of the participants were ready to comply in this. Yet, as Darius Rejali notes, half did not. Like the man we’ll hear resisting instructions in the following audio. Please note that the electric shock you are about to hear is fake and the subjects of punishment in the Milgram experiment were in fact actors, though participants believed they were administering real pain.”
Man: The experiment requires that you go on. Teacher, please continue.
[Buzzer]
Man: Incorrect. A hundred-and-fifty volts.
[Shock]
[Man groans]
Man Two: Sad face.
Subject: That’s all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart’s starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please.
Man: Continue. Go on.
Subject: You’re starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out.
Man Two: I think we ought to find out what’s wrong in there first.
Man: The experiment requires that you continue, teacher.
Man Two: Well, the experiment might require that we continue but I still think we should find out what the condition of the gentleman is.
Man: As I said before, although the shocks may be painful, they’re not dangerous.
Man Two: Look, I don’t know anything about electricity. I don’t profess any knowledge, nor will I go any further until I found out if the guy’s OK.
Man: It’s absolutely essential that you continue.
Man Two: Well, essential or not, this program isn’t quite that important to me that I should go along doing something that I know nothing about, particularly if it’s going to injure someone. I don’t know what this is all about.
Man: Well, whether the learner likes it or not, we must go on until he’s learned all the word pairs correctly.
Man Two: Well, you can sure have your $4.50 back. I didn’t want it anyhow. I intended to give it some charitable organization. But I wouldn’t go on with it.
Man: The $4.50 is not the issue here. That check is yours …
Man Two: Yeah, I realize that.
Man: … simply for coming to the lab. It is essential that you continue the experiment.
Man Two: No, it isn’t essential. Not one bit.
Man: You’ve got no other choice, teacher.
Man Two: Oh, I have a lot of choices. My number one choice is that I wouldn’t go on if I thought he was being harmed.
The closing of Fresh Kills turned out to be a big event in garbage history, since it triggered possibly the biggest trash transport program in history, as the city orchestrated a massive garbage trucking program that today ships its trash out all over the country. Of New York City’s 1.3 billion dollar annual budget, about $330 million a year goes towards exporting the trash.(07 nov 2010)
I knew, after just one day on the job, that san men constantly made judgments about individuals. They determined residents’ wealth or poverty by the artifacts they left behind. They appraised real estate by the height of a discarded Christmas tree, measured education level by the newspapers and magazines stacked on the curb. Glancing at the flotsam and jetsam as it tumbled through their hopper, they parsed health status and sexual practices.(07 nov 2010)
Turns out that for much of history, waste simply accumulated on floors inside dwellings. Residents would simply put in new layers of fresh clay to cover up the trash. Every dwelling was a micro landfill. When the floor rose too high, they raised the ceiling and doorways.
The result was that most ancient civilizations rose (literally) on a pile of their own trash. There is even a table of historical waste accumulation rates included. South Asia is the winner in this contest: the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilization apparently had the fastest accumulation of waste at nearly 1000cm/century.(07 nov 2010)
Garbage is important and interesting in an engineering sense because it illuminates one of the boundary conditions of any systemic view of the world. If you cut through the crap (no pun intended) of all our lofty views of ourselves, humanity is essentially a giant system that feeds on low-entropy resources on one end (mines, forests, oilfields) and defecates high-entropy waste at the other. Among other things, this transformation allows us to create low-entropy islands of order around ourselves (cities, buildings and everything else physical that we build). If this flow from resources to garbage were to shut down, nature would rapidly reclaim every inch of civilization, and you can read about this fascinating thought experiment in The World Without Us by Alan Weisman(07 nov 2010)
and ended with a description of a course I’d like to see taught in college. In fact, I’d like to teach it.
It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version.
I don’t care about the topic. I care about the editing. I care about the constant refinement and compression. I care about taking three pages and turning it one page. Then from one page into three paragraphs. Then from three paragraphs into one paragraph. And finally, from one paragraph into one perfectly distilled sentence.
In my experience, the big dividing line is having kids. Read this interview with P.J. O’Rourke and discover some shocking things coming out of his mouth about how he doesn’t want his kids to do drugs. Having kids makes you realize how narrowly you escaped killing yourself—and remember all the friends who overdosed, or got arrested on a DUI, or spent their twenties working at a job that would let them smoke up three times a day, only to realize at age 35 that they had pushed themselves into a dead end.
Before the pot-smoking parents start crawling out of the woodwork to tell me that I’m totally wrong, that there are lots of parents who support legal marijuana—I’m not saying this happens to every single person who has a kid. But in my experience, as the kids approach the teenage years, a lot of parents do suddenly realize they aren’t that interested in legal marijuana any more, and also, that totally unjust 21-year-old drinking age is probably a very good idea.
I’m emphasizing blood because it’s nice you have a collecting system built into your body that goes around and touches every place in your body and collects fluids. It’s very convenient for diagnostics. But there will probably be things that happen in tears, or in saliva, or in lymphatic fluid, or spinal fluid, but your body is plumbed very nicely for blood so that you can get it out easily, and since it delivers nutrients, and gets rid of waste, it pretty much is involved in anything very dramatic that’s happening in the body. It’s good low-hanging fruit, at least.
A really interesting point is that probably a lot of the system that is our healthy body actually doesn’t have human DNA at all. It has some other microbial DNA, and we probably are a complicated ecosystem of different types of our own cells, and lots of non-human microbial cells. Once we start looking at the proteome, we’ll be looking actually at the conversation of all of those cells, not just the human cells.
Some of those stripes that show up in the picture I showed, we can say, “Oh, that corresponds to this human gene.” Some of them, we don’t know they might be produced by some combination of other proteins, might be some other organism’s protein. Microbial protein would show up in that too, or response to microbes. One of the beauties of this is that we see everything, whether it’s of human origin or not. We actually can see it all in the proteome.
At last year’s Edge Master Class in Los Angeles, George Church and Craig Venter talked about Synthetic Genomics. Proteomics is relevant to that because it’s also a tool that such researchers could use since they need to debug their synthetic genomics. When you write a computer program, the first thing you do is you try to run it, and it almost always has a bug in it, so you see what happens, and you debug it, you stop it in the middle of running, and you see what the state of the system is, and you understand what your bug is, and then you change the program.
Right now George and Craig don’t have the debugger. Proteomics is the debugger that they need. When they write a program and it doesn’t work, which actually happens a lot, in order to tell why it’s not working, they need proteomics to say, “Oh, I see, this isn’t upregulating that enough, or downregulating that … “, and that will help them debug their program and tune their program. Right now a lot of synthetic genomics is about copying a naturally-evolved program, and saying, “Okay, I can make a copy of this program, and write it, and it does the same thing”, and that’s interesting. It would have been very surprising if it hadn’t worked.
On the business of proteomics
The business of proteomics had a false start a few years ago. As I said, proteomics can’t be done with the techniques and tools that are sitting around a laboratory, a biological laboratory; it’s not a biology problem. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who tried to do it with those tools and so there were a few companies that started up, and a lot of laboratory projects that started up, and they published a bunch of results probably prematurely, and they couldn’t replicate them because, you know, the next time they ran the tests it came out differently. It was so noisy that they had to do very, very large trials. So if you have a bad instrument, then it’s not going to work.
Because of that, proteomics got a bad name among the venture capitalists. Probably most venture capitalists will cut and run if you say “proteomics” right now because of the problems with the tools of a few years ago. What will happen is we’ll get some successes. In spite of this, there will be a few things like Applied Proteomics that get started, and there will be a few people with more vision that look at it more closely, and say, “This actually fixes the problem that they had before, because the story was right before, it was just they couldn’t make it work.” As soon as there is a success, then you’ll see a general change in attitude. Venture capital tends to work this way. There will be lots of people investing in this area, and there will be a boom very much like there was in genomics, and sequencing. Lots of effort will go into both the technology of doing the proteomics better, as it happened with genomics, and also the application of proteomics.
The cancering metaphor does mess up our standard model of medicine, where we just take the right pill to fix a given problem. But if you think about it, the idea that you should be able to take a pill, and it should magically fix a disease, a systems disease, a failure of the system, is kind of amazing that that’s even possible. The cases where it’s mostly possible is where you have an invading thing that doesn’t belong, like an infectious disease, and you take a pill that poisons that particular thing, like an antibiotic. There are a few cases where you’re just missing one component, and you take a pill that provides the missing ingredient, and so there will be a few magic cases like that, but those are very special kinds of failure, and I don’t think they’ll be the typical failure in cancer.
Unfortunately this whole idea of fixing a disease with a pill, while it’s delightful when it works, is not very generalizable. We haven’t found very many new pills lately that really cure diseases. In fact, the pharmaceutical industry is kind of broken right now because they’ve run out of this low-hanging fruit, a magical chemical that cures a disease. I don’t think we’re likely to find a lot of more those. They need a different model.
Let’s take somebody who has cancer. They used to be somebody who didn’t have cancer, and they had the same genome. So the difference between having cancer and not having cancer is clearly not just in the genome. There’s more to it than that. In fact, most of their cells aren’t cancering, and they have the same genome. Cancer is a dynamic process that’s happening, and it’s not just in the genome. Now, there may be a specific mutation from a genome that helps explain why it happened. For instance, one of the dramatic genetic test successes has been in breast cancer, BRCA1 and 2, which are specific genes that are associated with breast cancer. They occur a lot in Ashkenazi Jews, and a particular kind of breast cancer is associated with these genes. There are many examples like this where there’s a genetic predisposition to cancer, but is one of the clearest examples. The cancer isn’t inherited, but that’s a predisposition that is, so people that have the gene are more likely to have cancer.
Let me put it in terms of the conversational analogy. That means that certain words are missing, and in that case we know there is a conversation about fixing broken DNA. We’re repairing broken DNA and it’s hard to describe what to do without those words. You need to discuss BRCA1 and BRCA2, and you need to use those concepts. You need to use those words in order to repair DNA in a certain way. If you don’t have those words in your vocabulary, then you’re unable to execute this process of repairing DNA.
People cling to their intuitions, I think, not so much because they believe their cognitive algorithms are perfectly reliable, but because they can’t see their intuitions as the way their cognitive algorithms happen to look from the inside.
the fourier series and transform are some of the most amazing mathematical concepts.
Fourier series: you can express any periodic function using nothing more than a superposition of sine and cosine functions of varying wavelength and amplitude.
Fourier Transfrom: you can transform any function and find the amplitudes for each wavelength necessary to describe their superposition.
Example: if you measure the pressure as a function of time of the air by a piano while someone plays 3 notes simultaneously (a chord perhaps) you will get a seemingly “complex” waveform. Take the Fourier transform of that signal and you will get 3 spikes. The x location of each spike will tell you each of the 3 keys, and the amplitude of each spike will tell you how hard each key was pressed. It basically separates the information. Your brain does the same thing when you hear and see, which is why we can distinguish color and listen to one person in a noisy room.
Two experiments revealed that (i) people can more accurately predict their affective reactions to a future event when they know how a neighbor in their social network reacted to the event than when they know about the event itself and (ii) people do not believe this. Undergraduates made more accurate predictions about their affective reactions to a 5-minute speed date (n = 25) and to a peer evaluation (n = 88) when they knew only how another undergraduate had reacted to these events than when they had information about the events themselves. Both participants and independent judges mistakenly believed that predictions based on information about the event would be more accurate than predictions based on information about how another person had reacted to it.
Sometimes a single phrase will pop into my head and illuminate a murky idea for me. This happened a few days ago. The phrase was “ancient rivers of money” and suddenly it helped me understand the idea of inertia as it applies to business in a deeper way. Inertia in business comes from predictable cash flows. That’s not a particularly original thought, but you get to new insights once you start thinking about the age of a cash flow.
We think of cash-flow as a very present-moment kind of idea. It is money going in and out right now. But actually, major cash flow patterns are the oldest part of any business. It is the very stability of the cash flow that allows a business to form around it. In fact, most cash flows are older than the businesses that grow around them. They emerge from older cash flows. When you buy a sandwich at Subway, the few dollars that change hands are part of a very ancient river of money indeed. Through countless small and large course changes, the same river of money that once allowed some ancient Egyptian to buy some bread from his neighbor now allows you to buy a sandwich.(05 nov 2010)
those heavily-upvoted posts on hn and reddit about being wronged, aka, the urge to feel indignant(04 nov 2010)
In retrospect, I think a lot about Jeff Bezos’ advice: don’t be proud of your talents - be proud of the things you really worked hard to achieve.(04 nov 2010)
giving someone a note that says, "You are Lisa Simpson"(04 nov 2010)
what Aristotle once called the “lesbian” rule: “For when the thing is indefinite the rule also is indefinite, like the leaden rule used in making the Lesbian molding; the rule adapts itself to the shape of the stone and is not rigid, and so too the decree is adapted to the facts.”(03 nov 2010)
girl i wanna penetrate your myelin sheath(01 nov 2010)
a book or website or wiki in which people explain what they do on a daily basis, or give a concrete roundup of what they do(01 nov 2010)
your baseline activity, or what you do when you procrastinate… relate to a special kind of desk that had within view and easy reach piles and piles of interesting books, essays, movies, puzzles, writing assignments, programming exercises, projects, games, etc., activities perhaps arranged by intensity or duration, each assigned, maybe, a value that tracked their value in relation to some goal(01 nov 2010)
When conversing with a speechreader, exaggerated mouthing of words is not considered to be helpful and may in fact obscure useful clues. However, it is possible to learn to emphasize useful clues — this is known as lip speaking. (Lip reading - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(01 nov 2010)
“I never said she stole my money” has 7 different meanings depending on the stressed word(01 nov 2010)
bray: the laugh of an ass. also, verb, meaning to laugh loudly and harshly, or to abrade something into small pieces(01 nov 2010)
One of the most important features of wiki is the ease of reversion. It is what makes policing vandalism much cheaper than vandalism and hence allows an army of reviewers to keep wikipedia from becoming a pile of sophomoric swears.(01 nov 2010)
hunter s. thompson calling presidential campaign-elections "big bogus showdowns"(01 nov 2010)
You know that mode in NBA Jam or Madden where you can create a custom player, where you have a certain number of points which you can distribute among attributes? Yeah, well B_____ was like what you'd get if you were trying to make a C_______ but didn't have enough points.(31 oct 2010)
from the writers of The Wire who were fired for incompetence…(31 oct 2010)
Punishment generally involves the imposition of negative experience. The reason that greater fines and prison sentences constitute more severe punishments than lesser ones is, in large part, that they are assumed to impose greater negative experience. Hedonic adaptation reduces that difference in negative experience, thereby undermining efforts to achieve proportionality in punishment. Anyone who values punishing more serious crimes more severely than less serious crimes by an appropriate amount — as virtually everyone does — must therefore confront the implications of hedonic adaptation. Moreover, the unadaptable negativity of post-prison life which is caused by the experience of imprisonment results in punishments that go on far longer than is typically assumed. Objectivist retributive theories that fail to incorporate these facts risk creating grossly excessive punishments.(31 oct 2010)
In the minority game, an odd number of players each must choose one of two choices independently at each turn.
I can now summarize that whole post very briefly with the warren/plaza concept. The entire Harry Potter series is of poor literary quality because most of the books are very plaza-like overly-legible books. There is none of the atmosphere of mystery you get with warren-like books (the Lord of the Rings for instance). The overarching central-planning map overwhelms narratives and character arcs. The 3rd book is the only warren-like book.(31 oct 2010)
"Interrupt me once more, Baron," the Emperor said, "and you will lose the powers of interruption… forever."(30 oct 2010)
i should probably use the word "chancy" more often(30 oct 2010)
This is related to Lisp being oriented to the solitary hacker and
discipline-imposing languages being oriented to social packs, another
point you mention. In a pack you want to restrict everyone else’s
freedom as much as possible to reduce their ability to interfere with
and take advantage of you, and the only way to do that is by either
becoming chief (dangerous and unlikely) or by submitting to the same
rules that they do. If you submit to rules, you then want the rules
to be liberal so that you have a chance of doing most of what you want
to do, but not so liberal that others nail you.
In such a pack-programming world, the language is a constitution or
set of by-laws, and the interpreter/compiler/QA dept. acts in part as
a rule checker/enforcer/police force. Co-programmers want to know: If
I work with your code, will this help me or hurt me? Correctness is
undecidable (and generally unenforceable), so managers go with
whatever rule set (static type system, language restrictions, “lint”
program, etc.) shows up at the door when the project starts. (Rees Re: OO)(28 oct 2010)
Object-oriented
programming generates a lot of what looks like work.
Back in the days of fanfold, there was a type of programmer who
would only put five or ten lines of code on a page, preceded
by twenty lines of elaborately formatted comments.
Object-oriented programming is like crack for these people: it lets
you incorporate all this scaffolding right into your source
code. Something that a Lisp hacker might handle by pushing
a symbol onto a list becomes a whole file of classes and
methods. So it is a good tool if you want to convince yourself,
or someone else, that you are doing a lot of work. (Why Arc Isn’t Especially Object-Oriented)(28 oct 2010)
To implement a Lisp REPL, it is necessary only to implement these three functions and an infinite-loop function. (Naturally, the implementation of eval will be complicated, since it must also implement all the primitive functions like car and + and special operators like if.) This done, a basic REPL itself is but a single line of code: (loop (print (eval (read)))). (Read-eval-print loop - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(28 oct 2010)
Because the print function outputs in the same textual format that the read function uses for input, most results are printed in a form that could (if it’s useful) be copied and pasted back into the REPL. (Read-eval-print loop - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(28 oct 2010)
President Josiah Bartlet:
There’s a promise that I ask everyone who works here to make: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Do you know why?
Richard: I often wonder what he would think about all of this. Me, doing living history as him. You know, does he like it, does he not like it?
Beatrice: Do you feel like he’s watching? What do you think he’d say?
Richard: I don’t think he would be impressed. Once, I was leading a walk through Walden Pond as Thoreau. I had a group of eighth graders with me. And one asked, “Mr. Thoreau, if you knew that there was a guy 150 years from now pretending to be you, what would you say?” And at first I was really impressed, and I was thinking, “Oh, what a great question.” And without even missing a beat, I said (and I think this was a very “Henry” answer), “I would tell him to get his own life and leave mine alone.” I do think this is what he’d say. On the other hand, I’m also turning a lot of people on to him. So, I’m sure he’d appreciate the PR.(27 oct 2010)
The first climber to actually make bouldering his primary specialty (in the mid 1950s) and to advocate its acceptance as a legitimate sport not restricted to a particular area was John Gill, a mathematician and amateur gymnast who found the challenge and movement of bouldering enjoyable.[3] (Bouldering - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(26 oct 2010)
The Honor Code is so well followed that the college entrusts the students to 24-hour per day access to all buildings, including labs, and permits take-home exams, specified either as open-book or closed-book, or as timed or un-timed. (Harvey Mudd College - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(26 oct 2010)
During the construction of Case Dorm some students decided as a prank to move all of the survey stakes exactly one foot in one direction.[22] They did such a precise job that the construction crew didn’t notice until after they had laid the foundation, but California earthquake law forced them to reinspect the new location at some significant expense.[citation needed] (Harvey Mudd College - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(26 oct 2010)
A third of the student body are National Merit Scholars, and at one point, about 40 percent of graduates were going on to earn a Ph.D. — the highest rate of any college or university in the nation.[4][5] Harvey Mudd today still maintains the highest rate of science and engineering Ph.D. production among all undergraduate colleges and second highest (Caltech ranks first and MIT third) compared to all universities and colleges, according to a 2008 report by the National Science Foundation. (Harvey Mudd College - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(26 oct 2010)
the source actually said this, and the reporter didn’t see any problem with it; or maybe
the source said something sensible, and the reporter garbled it out of ignorance; or maybe
the source said something sensible, and the reporter garbled it on purpose, in order to make the source look stupid; or maybe
the source actually said this, and the reporter saw the stupidity but included it without comment or correction as ironic subversion; or maybe
the source said something sensible, and the reporter wrote something sensible, but an editor garbled it, whether out of ignorance or malice …
Or maybe the paper’s production facilities were infiltrated by a squad from The Onion. You get the idea — something is happening here, but we don’t know what it is. We know exactly what the sentence means, but we’re completely puzzled about how to interpret it. We’re reduced to doing a kind of attributional abduction: reasoning to the most likely explanation for the publication of this bone-headed remark.
Abduction is a kind of logical inference described by Charles Sanders Peirce as “guessing”[1] The term refers to the process of arriving at an explanatory hypothesis. Peirce said that to abduce a hypothetical explanation a from an observed surprising circumstance b is to surmise that a may be true because then b would be a matter of course.[2] Thus, to abduce a from b involves determining that a is sufficient (or nearly sufficient), but not necessary, for b.
For example, the lawn is wet. But if it rained last night, then it would be unsurprising that the lawn is wet. Therefore, by abductive reasoning, it rained last night. (But note that Peirce did not remain convinced that a single logical form covers all abduction.)[3]
Peirce argues that good abductive reasoning from P to Q involves not simply a determination that, e.g., Q is sufficient for P, but also that Q is among the most economical explanations for P. Simplification and economy are what call for the ‘leap’ of abduction.[4]
There has been renewed interest in the subject of abduction in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence research.[5]
blog post analyzing jimbo jeopardy data - there might be enough of it now(24 oct 2010)
In over a decade of public speaking experience, the biggest bang for the buck I’ve ever gotten was about eye contact. First, do it. Second, pick three people in the audience (left, center, right) to do it with. Speak individually to each one, rotating to the next after about a paragraph, cycling as many times as required. While you’re speaking to someone, they are your proxy for the audience: if she nods the audience is nodding, if she laughs the audience is laughing, if she looks confused the audience is confused. Adjust as required.
Here’s how the audience perceives what you’re doing: everyone will think you spent roughly one third of the speech talking to them, specifically, which is enough to be flattering but not enough to be creepy. The constant movement of attention means you keep moving [+] and don’t stare at one person for the entire speech. Your audience will come away with a feeling of closeness and emotional rapport because you were “listening” to them during the speech via your proxies.
Don’t give a speech seated or standing behind a podium/lectern: weak speakers have a tendency to hide, and the body language tends to come across as fidgeting even when it isn’t.
For starters, it is the modern system of presidential primaries, not imperial overreach, that presently permits extremists to gain major party nominations – and to transform the White House into a platform for hard-right or -left politics once they get elected.(23 oct 2010)
“Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.”
Do you see a common theme here? While not exclusively, these tend very strongly to be long-term, behaviorally-oriented interventions. Consider the classical therapies that were evaluated during the heroic phase of clinical trials in the mid-20th century – things like the streptomycin trials in Britain or polio vaccines in the US. These situations can be characterized by acute conditions that cause death or obvious loss of function within a short period, and that are addressed by treatments that apply a chemical to the body. As we shade from this kind of a problem to those characterized by conditions that affect people over many years, often in subjective ways, and are addressed by lifestyle changes or daily dosages of vitamins and so on, we are shading from medicine as classically conceived to something that is analytically much more like social science. This latter end of the spectrum is where the most common and severe problems with reliable determinations of causal effectiveness of interventions arise. This is not necessarily because researchers in these areas are less honest than those in other fields, but because the problem is inherently harder. Among other issues, signal-to-noise is worse, the relevant measurement period becomes years and decades rather than weeks and months, and the causal mechanism often becomes subtly entangled with many lifestyle behaviors. In such situations, RCTs are often impractical, and when they can be done, the integrated complexity of the causal mechanisms means that replications are much more likely to fail because unobserved context differences turn out to be relevant in determining success or failure of the treatment. The problem isn’t always the researchers; sometimes the problem is the problem.(22 oct 2010)
In an ideal world, someone would build a nice (optionally hosted?) wiki solution pulling and formatting Dropbox text files as webpages to give you the best of both worlds, perhaps combined with a few desktop apps and extensions to make offline viewing editing more pleasant.
Smart people who like themselves soon realize that other people like themselves too. They understand self-indulgence. They understand what it means to always be conscious of, and care about, how you are perceived. All marketing messaging is based on self-perception, whether it appears as an ad, a lifestyle-section trend story, or a sales strategy that relies on your salespeople wearing hipster clothes. Kid Red knows this unconsciously. He knows some people have a self-perception based on elitism. They like the best lemonade (as opposed to say the cheapest lemonade or the weirdest-colored lemonade). He probably likes the best lemonade himself. His elitism translates into an marketing strategy that focuses on hooking elitist self-perceptions.
Now Kid Green likes others. And she realizes that others like others too. They like their friends, enjoy interpersonal interactions, and buy from friends if possible. So she personalizes the interaction as much as she can. Trust matters more than product attributes. Kid Green and her customers would both rather buy from someone they know than someone who claims to have the best lemonade. Even if they do have elitist tastes, they are likely to go to a friend. Even if the stranger’s lemonade booth has a queue of a dozen people and the friend’s stand has no queue.
And finally PR, the latest kid on the block (I’ll explain why in a minute). Kid Blue has a message that isn’t about people at all, but about an idea: the role of lemonade in a hot-day story. You can see why this so easily segues into the news: you could pay the local radio station host to talk about beaches and lemonade as part of the weather report on hot days.(22 oct 2010)
In particular, after discovering a potential nest site, each scout bee performs a waggle dance whose orientation encodes the site’s location and whose duration encodes her assessment of the site’s quality. The better she perceives the site to be, the longer she dances. At first, the scout bees rely on discovering potential nest sites by chance, but once they observe other scouts dancing, they are more likely to investigate the sites advertised by those others. If they agree with the positive assessment of a site, they join the dance for it. In this way, sites supported by dancing bees are visited and inspected more often than other sites and, if not supported in error, tend to receive even more support. The process leads to a “consensus” relatively quickly – in one or two days – when the support rallies around one popular site; when a critical threshold is reached, the swarm moves there. Crucially, when there are quality differences between different potential nest sites, the bees usually find one of the best ones.
VIRGIL: It is. In colour, commonly, a pear is yellow with black spots.
BEATRICE: Like a banana again.
VIRGIL: No, not at all. A pear isn’t yellow in so bright, lustreless and opaque a way. It’s a paler, translucent yellow, moving towards beige, but not creamy, more watery, approaching the visual texture of a watercolour wash. And the spots are sometimes brown.
to say anything new or genuinely revelatory about his work, is that he has done so much himself to frame the discourse of his own reception, to provide in advance the terms for critical engagement with the work; his fiction already practices a rather efficient sort of autoexegesis that leaves the critic feeling a certain irrelevance (the posture of awestruck adoration that one finds in so much of the critical literature is, I think, one of the guises such irrelevance assumes). (blog | Reviews index)(21 oct 2010)
Note that even though the movies are not free, a large chunk of the revenue is generated by concessions—thus the movie model is actually closer to a maximizing mouths model than it might first appea(21 oct 2010)
There my beauty lay down on her stomach, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, her slightly raised shoulder blades, and the bloom along the incurvation of her spine, and the swellings of her tense narrow nates clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs. (Paris Review – Reading Lolita at Twelve, Nick Antosca)(21 oct 2010)
the origin of feces
(e.g., “this guy was the darwin of gastroenterology…”)(20 oct 2010)
better articulate the way in which recursion allows you to sidestep the solving of a hard problem(20 oct 2010)
a post about “curious bidirectional causality btween levels of a system, first in copycat (w codelets & the slipnet) and second in the careenium (w cims and cimballs). how does it relate to sudoku and crosswords?
think also of painting and writing, and the way in which the canvas (so to speak) itself does about half of your creative work.(20 oct 2010)
"My name is Turkish. Funny name for an Englishman, I know."(20 oct 2010)
I always saw a close kinship
between the needs of “pure” mathematics and a certain hero of Greek
mythology, Antaeus. The son of Earth, he had to touch the ground
every so often in order to reestablish contact with his Mother;
otherwise his strength waned. (Edge: A THEORY OF ROUGHNESS: A Talk with Benoit Mandelbrot)(20 oct 2010)
I make a living buying and selling used books. I browse the racks of thrift stores and library book sales using an electronic bar-code scanner. I push the button, a red laser hops about, and an LCD screen lights up with the resale values. It feels like being God in his own tiny recreational casino; my judgments are sure and simple, and I always win because I have foreknowledge of all bad bets. The software I use tells me the going price, on Amazon Marketplace, of the title I just scanned, along with the all-important sales rank, so I know the book’s prospects immediately. I turn a profit every time. (Confessions of a used-book salesman. - By Michael Savitz - Slate Magazine)(19 oct 2010)
to "manumit" is to release from slavery; free(19 oct 2010)
The adjective refers to anything suggestive of Kafka, especially his nightmarish style of narration, in which characters lack a clear course of action, the ability to see beyond immediate events, and the possibility of escape. The term’s meaning has transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical. (Kafkaesque - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(19 oct 2010)
The term, which is quite fluid in definition, has also been described as “marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity: Kafkaesque bureaucracies”[1] and “marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger: Kafkaesque fantasies of the impassive interrogation, the false trial, the confiscated passport … haunt his innocence” (Kafkaesque - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(19 oct 2010)
high standards
example: artificially low first grade in an english class(19 oct 2010)
Another example, which has been brilliant, is what he did with the retail stores.
He brought one of the top retailers in the world on his board to learn about retail (Mickey Drexler from The Gap, who advised Jobs to build a prototype store before launch). Not only did he learn about retail, I’ve never been in a better store than an Apple store. It has the highest revenue per square foot of any store in the world but it’s not just the revenue, it’s the experience.
An anecdotal story, a friend of mine was at meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day and this was in the last year, so this was recently. He went into the Apple meeting (he’s a vendor for Apple) and when he went into the meeting at Apple as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.
Later in the day he was at Microsoft. When he went into the Microsoft meeting, everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That’s a recipe for disaster.
One of the things that fascinated him: I described to him that there’s not much difference between a Pepsi and a Coke, but we were outsold 9 to 1. Our job was to convince people that Pepsi was a big enough decision that they ought to pay attention to it, and eventually switch. We decided that we had to treat Pepsi like a necktie. In that era people cared what necktie they wore. The necktie said: “Here’s how I want you to see me.” So we have to make Pepsi like a nice necktie. When you are holding a Pepsi in your hand, its says, “Here’s how I want you to see me.”
We did some research and we discovered that when people were going to serve soft drinks to a friend in their home, if they had Coca Cola in the fridge, they would go out to the kitchen, open the fridge, take out the Coke bottle, bring it out, put it on the table and pour a glass in front of their guests.
If it was a Pepsi, they would go out in to the kitchen, take it out of the fridge, open it, and pour it in a glass in the kitchen, and only bring the glass out. The point was people were embarrassed to have someone know that they were serving Pepsi. Maybe they would think it was Coke because Coke had a better perception. It was a better necktie. Steve was fascinated by that.
We talked a lot about how perception leads reality and how if you are going to create a reality you have to be able to create the perception. We did it with something called the Pepsi generation.
i think the reddit system of featuring one new story on the front page would be good. Show a story to a 100 users…if it doesn’t get an upvote…retire it, if it does show it to another 100…if a story doesn’t get 5 upvotes…retire it. (Hacker News | Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken)(19 oct 2010)
"utilize" does have a place, to connote that you're activating the tool-ness of x(19 oct 2010)
Almost any effort will serve to convince us that we have
“tried our hardest”, if trying our hardest is all we are trying to do. (Trying to Try - Less Wrong)(17 oct 2010)
I met a young college student who had been in foster care her entire life, and she would use the sympathy that her teachers had for her in order to avoid class work. She said to me, “I really wish my teachers had not accepted those excuses.” (Deborah Gist - Magazine - The Atlantic)(17 oct 2010)
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.(17 oct 2010)
For each consistent formal theory T having the required small amount of number theory, the corresponding Gödel sentence G asserts: “G cannot be proved to be true within the theory T”. If G were provable under the axioms and rules of inference of T, then T would have a theorem, G, which effectively contradicts itself, and thus the theory T would be inconsistent. This means that if the theory T is consistent then G cannot be proved within it, and so the theory T is incomplete. Moreover, G’s claim about its own unprovability is correct. In this sense G is not only unprovable but true. Thus provability-within-the-theory-T is not the same as truth. (Gödel’s incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(16 oct 2010)
In the first of the famous SICP lectures Hal Ableson explains that we are as ignorant about the true nature of computing as early Egyptians were about geometry. Those guys did impressive stuff with string and rocks but they didn’t really understand why it worked. It took Euclid to distill the axioms and methods we now file under geometry. The misfit name geo-metry, ie earth-measurement, is a fossil of its confused history. Perhaps the jumbled bag of tricks we call “computer science” —not a science, and not about computers— is similarly waiting for something to hatch.(16 oct 2010)
Hitbox tuning is a really fundamental part of game feel, even if your game is using circles and not strictly boxes. Tweaking the hitbox can help make your game more forgiving or more challenging, depending on what you’re going for. In the case of the player, I wanted to make it more forgiving - but that doesn’t just mean making it smaller or bigger.
Since the runner spends most of his time jumping from rooftop to rooftop and hopping over boxes (or trying to anyways), I tried to modify his hitbox to make those activities as easy and natural as possible. There isn’t much hitbox out in front of the player, so you can get awfully close to the boxes without actually triggering a collision and stumbling. Likewise, with the box hanging off the player’s left side quite a bit, you can pretty well run right off the side of a building and still leap at the last moment. All of this just provides a little extra cushioning for people’s reaction times, which gives me more latitude to add more exciting challenges without frustrating people too badly.
Oh one last thing - the obstacles themselves have funny looking hitboxes too. They’re just 2 pixels tall! This way if the player is pretty much jumping at all, they’ll easily clear the box. It’s all about making things “feel right”, and getting rid of those moments when the player says, “What!! I SO MADE THAT, what the f-“.
Limitations, honestly faced, are the greatest assets in producing a work of art. I am always impressed by ones ability to push his limitations to unknown, unexplored, realms rather than settling for the unexplicable endowment of talent. Anyone with their five senses operating normally is talented.(15 oct 2010)
how robots tell each other off, by gesticulating in a sequence of fists (0s) and finger-points (1s)(14 oct 2010)
Mamihlapinatapai (sometimes spelled mamihlapinatapei)(insert IPA pronunciation) is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word", and is considered one of the hardest words to translate.[1] It describes "a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that they both desire but which neither one wants to start."(10 oct 2010)
framing in the context of academic papers. the difference between a blog post and a draft on ssrn.(10 oct 2010)
how much better to be here, in the fishbowl, on a sunday night, than in a room in metropolis(10 oct 2010)
The price of, say, AAPL at any given moment is a numerical value that represents the output of one set of concurrently running processes, and it also acts as the input for another set of processes. AAPL, then, is one of many hundreds of thousands of global variables that the market-as-software uses for message-passing among its billions of simultaneously running threads. (The stock market as a single, very big piece of multithreaded software)(08 oct 2010)
Sewers are kind of a miracle. You get the feeling that if the leaders of the current American political system had to build one in every city, we’d all just get used to septic tanks and trenches along the streets.(06 oct 2010)
every bit as dysfunctional as a Muscovite politburo(05 oct 2010)
how remarkably cool those people were when we kicked a soccer ball into their picnic three times, including one that hit their baby in the back.(03 oct 2010)
the way people at the back of a line feel about people at the front(02 oct 2010)
the dull metal heft of the axe that gives the cutting edge its
power ()(02 oct 2010)
how does a coin-flipper affect newcomb's problem?(02 oct 2010)
Throughout the course of the program, you also get a lot of good advice, feedback from guest speakers and in a particular polygram, there’s a lot of good insight. That being said, I think what we needed the most at that moment in time was to get the same room together and really just work 110%. So like I said before, I had been in Boston, my partners had been in San Francisco. During Y Combinator, we were living in the same apartment, we all woke up at eight am and we worked until midnight six days a week. And we took about three hours off over the course of the day to basically cook, shower, and go to the gym together.
And I want to say, too, that humorists are very commonly the youngest children in their families. When I was the littlest kid at our supper table, there was only one way I could get anybody’s attention, and that was to be funny. I had to specialize. I used to listen to radio comedians very intently, so I could learn how to make jokes. And that’s what my books are, now that I’m a grownup—mosaics of jokes.
The others aren’t that much fun to describe: somebody gets into trouble, and then gets out again; somebody loses something and gets it back; somebody is wronged and gets revenge; Cinderella; somebody hits the skids and just goes down, down, down; people fall in love with each other, and a lot of other people get in the way; a virtuous person is falsely accused of sin; a sinful person is believed to be virtuous; a person faces a challenge bravely, and succeeds or fails; a person lies, a person steals, a person kills, a person commits fornication.
INTERVIEWER
If you will pardon my saying so, these are very old-fashioned plots.
VONNEGUT
I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger. Now, there’s an admirable practical joke for you. When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do. You can also exclude the reader by not telling him immediately where the story is taking place, and who the people are—
INTERVIEWER
And what they want.
VONNEGUT
Yes. And you can put him to sleep by never having characters confront each other. Students like to say that they stage no confrontations because people avoid confrontations in modern life. “Modern life is so lonely,” they say. This is laziness. It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all. If a writer can’t or won’t do that, he should withdraw from the trade.
It’s a mechanical problem. So much of what happens in storytelling is mechanical, has to do with the technical problems of how to make a story work. Cowboy stories and policeman stories end in shoot-outs, for example, because shoot-outs are the most reliable mechanisms for making such stories end. There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: “The end.” I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.
In a way. I’m on the New York State Council for the Arts now, and every so often some other member talks about sending notices to college English departments about some literary opportunity, and I say, “Send them to the chemistry departments, send them to the zoology departments, send them to the anthropology departments and the astronomy departments and physics departments, and all the medical and law schools. That’s where the writers are most likely to be.”
INTERVIEWER
You believe that?
VONNEGUT
I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
Sure. We loved Laurel and Hardy. You know what one of the funniest things is that can happen in a film?
INTERVIEWER
No.
VONNEGUT
To have somebody walk through what looks like a shallow little puddle, but which is actually six feet deep. I remember a movie where Cary Grant was loping across lawns at night. He came to a low hedge, which he cleared ever so gracefully, only there was a twenty-foot drop on the other side. But the thing my sister and I loved best was when somebody in a movie would tell everybody off, and then make a grand exit into the coat closet. He had to come out again, of course, all tangled in coat hangers and scarves.
Can you explain how you came to notice this about Shakespeare’s protagonists?
BLOOM
Yes, I can even remember the particular moment. I was teaching King Lear, and I’d reached a moment in the play that has always fascinated me. I suddenly saw what was going on. Edmund is the most remarkable villain in all Shakespeare, a manipulator so strong that he makes Iago seem minor in comparison. Edmund is a sophisticated and sardonic consciousness who can run rings around anyone else on the stage in King Lear. He is so foul that it takes Goneril and Regan, really, to match up to him … He’s received his death wound from his brother; he’s lying there on the battlefield. They bring in word that Goneril and Regan are dead—one slew the other and then committed suicide for his sake. Edmund broods out loud and says, quite extraordinarily (it’s all in four words), “Yet Edmund was belov’d.” One looks at those four words totally startled. As soon as he says it, he starts to ponder out loud. What are the implications that, though two monsters of the deep, the two loved me so much that one of them killed the other and then murdered herself. He reasons it out. He says, “The one the other poison’d for my sake / And after slew herself.” And then he suddenly says, “I pant for life,” and then amazingly he says, “Some good I mean to do / despite of mine own nature,” and he suddenly gasps out, having given the order for Lear and Cordelia to be killed, “Send in time,” to stop it. They don’t get there in time. Cordelia’s been murdered. And then Edmund dies. But that’s an astonishing change. It comes about as he hears himself say in real astonishment, “Yet Edmund was belov’d,” and on that basis, he starts to ponder. Had he not said that, he would not have changed. There’s nothing like that in literature before Shakespeare. It makes Freud unnecessary. The representation of inwardness is so absolute and large that we have no parallel to it before then
How does one react to the school of resentment? By declaring oneself an aesthete?
BLOOM
Well, I do that now, of course, in furious reaction to their school and to so much other pernicious nonsense that goes on. I would certainly see myself as an aesthete in the sense advocated by Ruskin, indeed to a considerable degree by Emerson, and certainly by the divine Walter and the sublime Oscar. It is a very engaged kind of mode. Literary criticism in the United States increasingly is split between very low level literary journalism and what I increasingly regard as a disaster, which is literary criticism in the academies, particularly in the younger generations. Increasingly scores and scores of graduate students have read the absurd Lacan but have never read Edmund Spenser; or have read a great deal of Foucault or Derrida but scarcely read Shakespeare or Milton. That’s obviously an absurd defeat for literary study. When I was a young man back in the fifties starting out on what was to be my career, I used to proclaim that my chosen profession seemed to consist of secular clergy or clerisy. I was thinking, of course, of the highly Anglo-Catholic New Criticism under the sponsorship or demigodness of T. S. Eliot. But I realized in latish middle age that, no better or worse, I was surrounded by a pride of displaced social workers, a rabblement of lemmings, all rushing down to the sea carrying their subject down to destruction with them. The school of resentment is an extraordinary sort of mélange of latest-model feminists, Lacanians, that whole semiotic cackle, latest-model pseudo-Marxists, so-called New Historicists, who are neither new nor historicist, and third generation deconstructors, who I believe have no relationship whatever to literary values. It’s really a very paltry kind of a phenomenon. But it is pervasive, and it seems to be waxing rather than waning. It is a very rare thing indeed to encounter one critic, academic or otherwise, not just in the English-speaking world, but also in France or Italy, who has an authentic commitment to aesthetic values, who reads for the pleasure of reading, and who values poetry or story as such, above all else. Reading has become a very curious kind of activity. It has become tendentious in the extreme. A sheer deliquescence has taken place because of this obsession with the methods or supposed method. Criticism starts—it has to start—with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems. You must fall in love with what we used to call “imaginative literature.” And when you are in love that way, with or without provocation from good teachers, you will pass on to encounter what used to be called the sublime. And as soon as you do this, you pass into the agonistic mode, even if your own nature is anything but agonistic. In the end, the spirit that makes one a fan of a particular athlete or a particular team is different only in degree, not in kind, from the spirit that teaches one to prefer one poet to another, or one novelist to another. That is to say there is some element of competition at every point in one’s experience as a reader. How could there not be? Perhaps you learn this more fully as you get older, but in the end you choose between books, or you choose between poems, the way you choose between people. You can’t become friends with every acquaintance you make, and I would not think that it is any different with what you read.
At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act - rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or 'express' an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.
The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.(27 sep 2010)
chi·a·ro·scu·ro
Noun/kēˌärəˈsk(y)o͝orō//kēˌarə-/
chiaroscuros
plural
The treatment of light and shade in drawing and painting
An effect of contrasted light and shadow created by light falling unevenly or from a particular direction on something
Does the onlooker realize the amount of affection which goes into a work of art - the intense affection - and total conviction?(27 sep 2010)
Mr Pollock, the classical artists had a world to express and they did so by representing the objects in that world. Why doesn't the modern artist do the same thing?
JP: H'm - the modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.(27 sep 2010)
I suppose every time you are approached by a layman they ask you how they should look at a Pollock painting, or any other modern painting - what they look for - how do they learn to appreciate modern art?
JP: I think they should not look for, but look passively - and try to receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for.(27 sep 2010)
People frequently ask why my canvases are compartmentalized. No one ever asks this about a house. A man with a large family would not choose to live in a one-room house.. ..I am like a man with a large family and must have many rooms. The children of my imagination occupy the various compartments of my painting, each independent and occupying its own place. At the same time they have the proper atmosphere in which to function together, in harmony and as a unified group. One can say that my paintings are like a house, in which each occupant has a room of his own.’ (Adolph Gottlieb - Wikiquote)(27 sep 2010)
Published in “The Ides of Art: The Attitudes of Ten Artists on Their Art and Contemporaneousness” The Tiger’s Eye, vol. 1, no. 2, December 1947
Certain people always say we should go back to nature. I notice they never say we should go forward to nature. It seems to me they are more concerned that we should go back, than about nature.
If the models we use are the apparitions seen in a dream, or the recollection of our pre-historic past, is this less part of nature or realism, than a cow in the field? I think not.
The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time.
I helped run a large, high volume college bar for around 8 years and then opened and operated my own venture (with partners) for a year or so.
Much of the details of your venture will depend entirely on its location. Sticking to advice that will apply no matter where you are:
If you have to equip the place from scratch and need to do it on the cheap, find restaurant auctions around your location. Restaurant and bar equipment depreciates at a sickening rate, and they go out of business frequently. You can save well over 70% off of catalog for six month old equipment.
Find a local insurance agent and get to know them very well. Don’t ever, ever skimp on liability insurance.
In my experience far and away most important aspect of operating a bar is the staff that you employ. Obviously they need to be as trustworthy as possible - employee theft is a constant. Much like fighting illegal downloads you will be fighting to minimize it rather than abolishing it. The theft will rarely be in the form of removing money from the register till, but rather in the form of unpaid product.
The larger reason that your hires will be important though is because hiring the right people is the most effective form of marketing that you can possibly do. Hiring a staff of well connected, social butterfly waitresses, door guys, and bartenders has an infinitely higher ROI than any print or radio marketing that you can do.
That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection—none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut. So you think to yourself, My work will live on. As I’ve said many times, rather than live on in the hearts and minds of my fellow man, I would rather live on in my apartment. (Paris Review - The Art of Humor No. 1, Woody Allen)(26 sep 2010)
The modern masterpiece of confusion is Joyce’s Ulysses. There the mind is unable to resist experience. Experience in all its diversity, its pleasure and horror, passes through Bloom’s head like an ocean through a sponge. The sponge can’t resist; it has to accept whatever the waters bring. It also notes every microorganism that passes through it. This is what I mean. How much of this must the spirit suffer, in what detail is it obliged to receive this ocean with its human plankton? Sometimes it looks as if the power of the mind has been nullified by the volume of experiences. But of course this is assuming the degree of passivity that Joyce assumes in Ulysses. Stronger, more purposeful minds can demand order, impose order, select, disregard, but there is still the threat of disintegration under the particulars. A Faustian artist is unwilling to surrender to the mass of particulars.
You have on occasion divided recent American fiction into what you call the “cleans” and the “dirties.” The former, I gather, tend to be conservative and easily optimistic, the latter the eternal naysayers, rebels, iconoclasts. Do you feel this is still pretty much the picture of American fiction today?
BELLOW
I feel that both choices are rudimentary and pitiful, and though I know the uselessness of advocating any given path to other novelists, I am still inclined to say, Leave both these extremes. They are useless, childish. No wonder the really powerful men in our society, whether politicians or scientists, hold writers and poets in contempt. They do it because they get no evidence from modern literature that anybody is thinking about any significant question. What does the radicalism of radical writers nowadays amount to? Most of it is hand-me-down bohemianism, sentimental populism, D. H. Lawrence-and-water, or imitation Sartre. For American writers radicalism is a question of honor. They must be radicals for the sake of their dignity. They see it as their function, and a noble function, to say Nay, and to bite not only the hand that feeds them (and feeds them with comic abundance, I might add) but almost any other hand held out to them. Their radicalism, however, is contentless. A genuine radicalism, which truly challenges authority, we need desperately. But a radicalism of posture is easy and banal. Radical criticism requires knowledge, not posture, not slogans, not rant. People who maintain their dignity as artists, in a small way, by being mischievous on television, simply delight the networks and the public. True radicalism requires homework—thought. Of the cleans, on the other hand, there isn’t much to say. They seem faded.
How much are you conscious of the reader when you write? Is there an ideal audience that you write for?
BELLOW
I have in mind another human being who will understand me. I count on this. Not on perfect understanding, which is Cartesian, but on approximate understanding, which is Jewish. And on a meeting of sympathies, which is human. But I have no ideal reader in my head, no.
Do these preparations include your coming to some general conception of the work?
BELLOW
Well, I don’t know exactly how it’s done. I let it alone a good deal. I try to avoid common forms of strain and distortion. For a long time, perhaps from the middle of the nineteenth century, writers have not been satisfied to regard themselves simply as writers. They have required also a theoretical framework. Most often they have been their own theoreticians, have created their own ground as artists, and have provided an exegesis for their own works. They have found it necessary to take a position, not merely to write novels. In bed last night I was reading a collection of articles by Stendhal. One of them amused me very much, touched me. Stendhal was saying how lucky writers were in the age of Louis XIV not to have anyone take them very seriously. Their obscurity was very valuable. Corneille had been dead for several days before anyone at court considered the fact important enough to mention. In the nineteenth century, says Stendhal, there would have been several public orations, Corneille’s funeral covered by all the papers. There are great advantages in not being taken too seriously. Some writers are excessively serious about themselves. They accept the ideas of the “cultivated public.” There is such a thing as overcapitalizing the A in artist. Certain writers and musicians understand this. Stravinsky says the composer should practice his trade exactly as a shoemaker does. Mozart and Haydn accepted commissions—wrote to order. In the nineteenth century, the artist loftily waited for Inspiration. Once you elevate yourself to the rank of a cultural institution, you’re in for a lot of trouble.
Mr. Bellow was not interested in responding to criticisms of his work that he found trivial or stupid. He quoted the Jewish proverb that a fool can throw a stone into the water that ten wise men cannot recover. (Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 37, Saul Bellow)(26 sep 2010)
i think that when someone says that "X is ten times bigger than y", the image conjured in our minds is of a single unit—a marble, say—copied ten times. we do this for any value of y.
but the effect of this abstraction is to mislead us, because it causes us to think—at least on an intuitive visual level—that the difference between one million and ten million is something like the difference between one and ten.
to repair such a foible, one might do well to imagine a massive horde of marbles, a million strong, and then to imagine another horde, exactly as massive, proceeding in after it… continuing the procession of hordes until ten gigantic armies have combined.(26 sep 2010)
INTERVIEWER
Finally, a fundamental question: as a creative writer what do you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of fact, rather than fact itself?
HEMINGWAY
Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?
How detached must you be from an experience before you can write about it in fictional terms? The African air crashes you were involved in, for instance?
HEMINGWAY
It depends on the experience. One part of you sees it with complete detachment from the start. Another part is very involved. I think there is no rule about how soon one should write about it. It would depend on how well adjusted the individual was and on his or her recuperative powers. Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.
Archibald MacLeish has spoken of a method of conveying experience to a reader which he said you developed while covering baseball games back in those Kansas City Star days. It was simply that experience is communicated by small details, intimately preserved, which have the effect of indicating the whole by making the reader conscious of what he had been aware of only subconsciously … .
HEMINGWAY
The anecdote is apocryphal. I never wrote baseball for the Star. What Archie was trying to remember was how I was trying to learn in Chicago in around 1920 and was searching for the unnoticed things that made emotions, such as the way an outfielder tossed his glove without looking back to where it fell, the squeak of resin on canvas under a fighter’s flat-soled gym shoes, the gray color of Jack Blackburn’s skin when he had just come out of stir, and other things I noted as a painter sketches. You saw Blackburn’s strange color and the old razor cuts and the way he spun a man before you knew his history. These were the things which moved you before you knew the story.
What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?
HEMINGWAY
Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.
Could you say something of this process? When do you work? Do you keep to a strict schedule?
HEMINGWAY
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.
This dedication to his art may suggest a personality at odds with the rambunctious, carefree, world-wheeling Hemingway-at-play of popular conception. The fact is that Hemingway, while obviously enjoying life, brings an equivalent dedication to everything he does—an outlook that is essentially serious, with a horror of the inaccurate, the fraudulent, the deceptive, the half-baked.
Nowhere is the dedication he gives his art more evident than in the yellow-tiled bedroom—where early in the morning Hemingway gets up to stand in absolute concentration in front of his reading board, moving only to shift weight from one foot to another, perspiring heavily when the work is going well, excited as a boy, fretful, miserable when the artistic touch momentarily vanishes—slave of a self-imposed discipline which lasts until about noon when he takes a knotted walking stick and leaves the house for the swimming pool where he takes his daily half-mile swim.
Hemingway may admit superstitions of this sort, but he prefers not to talk about them, feeling that whatever value they may have can be talked away. He has much the same attitude about writing. Many times during the making of this interview he stressed that the craft of writing should not be tampered with by an excess of scrutiny—“that though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.” (Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 21, Ernest Hemingway)(25 sep 2010)
A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.
When Hemingway starts on a project he always begins with a pencil, using the reading board to write on onionskin typewriter paper. He keeps a sheaf of the blank paper on a clipboard to the left of the typewriter, extracting the paper a sheet at a time from under a metal clip that reads “These Must Be Paid.” He places the paper slantwise on the reading board, leans against the board with his left arm, steadying the paper with his hand, and fills the paper with handwriting which through the years has become larger, more boyish, with a paucity of punctuation, very few capitals, and often the period marked with an X. The page completed, he clips it facedown on another clipboard that he places off to the right of the typewriter.
Hemingway shifts to the typewriter, lifting off the reading board, only when the writing is going fast and well, or when the writing is, for him at least, simple: dialogue, for instance.
He keeps track of his daily progress—“so as not to kid myself”—on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head. The numbers on the chart showing the daily output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so he won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.
The Fremen also have complex rituals and systems focusing on the value and conservation of water on their arid planet; they conserve the water distilled from their dead, consider spitting an honorable greeting, and value tears as the greatest gift one can give to the dead (Dune (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(25 sep 2010)
Poverty grass may refer to:
Any of several grasses that grow in poor or sandy soil
To use another kind of analogy, let’s say we didn’t understand anything about plumbing, but occasionally we came home and our living room is filling up with water, and sometimes we come home, the kitchen is filling up with water, and so we start describing the problem as, “Well, my house has water, that’s the problem.” We might even divide it and say, “My house has kitchen water, or my house has living room water.” If plumbers were like doctors the best they might be able to say is “we’ve learned about kitchen water, and if we pour a lot of drano in the kitchen, then kitchen water sometimes goes away. Living room water is fixed by pouring a lot of tar on the roof.” Indeed, there might be ways of fixing the problem, but what you really need is to understand about plumbing. You should be worried about the process that’s creating the water, and understanding about what’s supposed to be draining, and what’s supposed to be holding it, and so on.
What we’ve got in medicine now is kind of help-desk debugging. We put you into a category. In cancer we start by putting it in a category that’s based on the part of the body where symptoms of the cancer have been shown. Then we test drugs that way: Does this drug work on lung cancer, and if it does, well, it’s not approved for prostate cancer because we tested it on lung cancer. That’s a whole other experiment, that’s a different category of disease. Then we subcategorize them. We take a biopsy sample, and we say, “Well, these cells are kind of squishy and long, and those are kind of round, so we have the squishy, long cancer, and the round cancer.” We declare that we have two forms of breast cancer.
We keep coming up with more kinds of cancer as we measure more things, and then we subdivide the categories. There used to be dozens of kinds of cancer, and now there are hundreds of kinds of cancer. But I actually think there are millions or billions of kinds of cancer. Cancer is a failure of the system. Happy families are all alike, but unhappy families are all unhappy in their own special way, and happy bodies are kind of all alike, but when they break down, they all break down in their own special ways.
The breaking down is at the level of this conversation that’s going on between the cells, that somehow the cells are deciding to divide when they shouldn’t, not telling each other to die, or telling each other to make blood vessels when they shouldn’t, or telling each other lies. Somehow all the regulation that is supposed to happen in this conversation is broken. Cancer is a symptom of that being broken, and so when we see a whole bunch of cells starting to divide uncontrollably in an area, we call that “cancer”, and depending on the area, we’ll call it “lung cancer”, or “brain cancer”. But that’s not actually what’s wrong, that’s a symptom of what’s wrong.
Interestingly enough, that way of looking at things is not the only one in the history of medicine. Historically, doctors had theories that are today more like Ayurvedic medicine, with its emphasis on balances between various forces in the body. Or in the West, a medieval doctor might have tried to make you less choleric or more phlegmatic. The idea was to try to restore the order of the various forces that were controlling the body. It’s interesting, at the time that the germ theory of disease was really exploding, and antibiotics were being discovered, J.B.S. Haldane said, “This is a disaster for medicine because we’re going to get focused on these germs, and we’re going to forget about the system.” He was right.
Indeed, if you look at what happened, it was a disaster for treating diseases like cancer because we started thinking of them almost like they’re infectious diseases. It’s a habit of thought, so when a patient comes in, we diagnose them, and we put them in a category, and then we try to apply the treatment that is shown to work on that category. We do a blind clinical trial of how people that are in that category respond to a certain drug. That makes a lot of sense for infectious diseases because infections are species, they speciate, and divide out, so putting them in categories makes a huge amount of sense.
But a systems disease like cancer, or an auto-immune disease, is a break down in the system, much more like a program bug. We would never think of debugging a computer by putting it into one of twelve categories, and doing something based on the category. Actually we do, it is kind of “help-desk debugging” that doesn’t work very well in complex situations.
There is a big difference between help-desk programming debugging, and the kind of debugging a programmer really does when they’re trying to more subtly fix a program.
It’s true that the human body is an amazing structure, but what’s much more interesting is the process that builds it, that maintains it, modifies it. That’s not really in the genes, it’s in the conversation that’s happening between all the parts of the body, and the conversation is happening within the little molecular machines within the cell, or between the cells in the body. Your body has tens of trillions of cells in it, more than the population of the earth, and all these cells are talking to each other, sending each other signals, there’s signaling going on within the cell.
To emphasize this other way of looking at it I like to look at the genome, not just as a parts list, but as the vocabulary list for this conversation. It’s a useful thing to know, but the really interesting thing to do is to listen in on the conversation. What are these machines all saying to each other? That’s what proteomics is about.
You’ve probably heard the genome described as like a blueprint for producing an organism. That’s a very misleading analogy because a blueprint is interesting because it says how everything is connected, and how the parts relate to each other. In fact, the genome, at least the part of the genome that we understand how to read, actually doesn’t tell you that at all. It’s kind of a list of the parts. It does have some control information on it about when different parts should be made, but for the most part we don’t know how to read that control information right now. What we know how to read is the parts list. While that’s a very useful thing, it’s probably not the most important thing that we need to know to understand what’s going on.
Palmer asserts that manipulation pervades his field. Game farms, he writes, have built a cottage industry around supplying nature programs with exotic animals. Much of the sound in wildlife films is manufactured in the studio. Interactions between predator and prey are routinely staged.
“And if you see a bear feeding on a deer carcass in a film,” Palmer writes, “it is almost certainly a tame bear searching for hidden jellybeans in the entrails of the deer’s stomach.”(25 sep 2010)
the correctness and decidability of rule sets in sports(25 sep 2010)
eavesdropping on web traffic in cafes across the country(24 sep 2010)
You won’t catch me saying that my machine has made me a better writer, but I don’t think it has made me any worse. Since I now spend less time and energy retyping, I have more left over for editing and rewriting, There is even an editing step possible only with the machines. When I think I’m finished with an article, I set the print speed to Slow. This runs the printer at about 100 words per minute, or roughly the pace of reading aloud. I stuff my ears with earplugs and then lean over the platen as the printing begins. Watching the article printed at this speed is like hearing it read; infelicities are more difficult to ignore than when you are scooting your eye over words on a page. (Living With a Computer - Magazine - The Atlantic)(24 sep 2010)
increasing one's personal tempo - e.g., with showers(22 sep 2010)
I agree of course that one must not *glibly equate* genes and memes. While
I still like the notion, I also concede there are countless ways in which
this metaphor falls short in representing reality,. Yet isn’t this a trivial
criticism, given that *all* metaphors — being comparisons of things that
are alike yet also different — are :necessarily “false” to some degree?.
This irrreducible falsehood of metaphors shouldn’t bother us much — metaphors
are meant to be used as tools, not as truths.. And if the tool doesn’t
work for you, you can abandon it without concluding that it doesn’t work
for anyone else, either.
To learn how to write real programs, you need to read real programs. Is Emacs bugging you? Open the source and see how it works. Web server crashed? Read the source and fix the bug. Not sure how to configure cron? Take a look at its config parser!
Many “programmers” spend their entire life treating everything as a black box. Take a look inside the box! That’s how you really learn to program.(22 sep 2010)
In drawing out a scenario’s implications, we apply much of the same cognitive apparatus whether we are working online, with input from sense perception, or offline, with input from imagination. (Reclaiming the Imagination - NYTimes.com)(21 sep 2010)
"if i was ever going to be on an ark like Noah's it'd be as…"(21 sep 2010)
the way glasses look on people in commercials and unusually good-looking people (they look like a true accessory, like a removable add-on to someone's face), vs. the way they look on regulos (where they define the face, become inextricable)(20 sep 2010)
bouldering as physical puzzle-solving in an almost comically direct sense(20 sep 2010)
The following short-hand notations are frequently used to comment moves:
! a particularly good (and usually surprising) move
It’s a kind of scientific integrity,
a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of
utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if
you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you
think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about
it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and
things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other
experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can
tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be
given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know
anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you
make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then
you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well
as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem.
When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate
theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that
those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea
for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else
come out right, in addition. (Cargo Cult Science)(20 sep 2010)
Q. How do you feel about the aging process?
A. Well, I’m against it. [laughs] I think it has nothing to recommend it. You don’t gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens. People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you’d trade all of that for being 35 again. I’ve experienced that thing where you wake up in the middle of the night and you start to think about your own mortality and envision it, and it gives you a little shiver. That’s what happens to Anthony Hopkins at the beginning of the movie, and from then on in, he did not want to hear from his more realistic wife, “Oh, you can’t keep doing that — you’re not young anymore.” Yes, she’s right, but nobody wants to hear that.
I’d just like to point out that your pillars of diversity, your little Italy, Chinatown, Harlem, etc., amount to little more than an eclectic set of restaurants. When’s the last time you hung out with a Hispanic family, or Hasidic Jews, or God forbid a poor person? (insixitive» Archives» Suburbs and the City: a Snippy Dialogue)(19 sep 2010)
Camus said women are all we can know of earthly paradise and I happen to agree with that as a male.(19 sep 2010)
My mother told me I was a very sweet kid when I was very little. But at 5 or 6, I turned into a nasty kid. I always feel that it was a reaction to becoming aware, and that I never have come to terms with it. I could never just be thankful. I think we’re getting a raw deal and I can’t reconcile myself to it. People say that death is a part of life and there must be something to it, but I just see it as bad news and I want everybody to stop sugarcoating it. Then maybe we can figure out how to deal with the problem.(19 sep 2010)
strong usage: “As to this there has developed a tradition that is unbending and inveterate.”(19 sep 2010)
enough of this "dysfunction" talk… what about datfunction?(18 sep 2010)
After a while Rob shouts, she's in the attic.
Carol stops midsentence, she looks like she's been slapped. She says, do you want me to go on?
Rob is like, you're not inhabiting your role.
So I'm not shy, I go, who's in the attic?
Haven't I told you that story? Rob says, even though he knows he's never told us, it's like this big mystery. So while Carol is standing up there in front of the class with tears forming in her eyes, Rob finally tells this story about how this actress—really talented, right?—married a rich guy who wanted to make her a big star so he was basically buying her the starring roles in these plays, like he would put up the money for the plays if the director would let her play the lead. So one of the roles he buys for her is Anne in The Diary of Anne Frank. Well, this bimbo was so bad that by the time the Gestapo came knocking on the door to take her away the one guy who was left in the theater shouts—she's in the attic!(17 sep 2010)
“hipsterism fetishizes the authentic […] and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity.”(16 sep 2010)
re-recording messages and setting it as urgent (red text & moves to the front of the queue)(15 sep 2010)
the irrational voter and two-boxing on newcomb’s(13 sep 2010)
They finally cut one last hole, and called in with our loudspeaker that it was safe, the Marines had control of their ship, and to please come out. The ship’s captain peered hesitatingly from behind a steel bulkhead, still unwilling to come forward. Sgt Chesmore ripped an American flag patch from his shooter’s kit and held into the room as a final identification. The captain broke into a huge smile and immediately called his crew from their hiding places.(13 sep 2010)
enough of this "triatholon" talk… it's time you start thinking about this thing as a doatholon(13 sep 2010)
Mark Broadie, a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia and an avid golfer, understood the fundamental problem with golf statistics: They don’t factor in distance and location. Professor Broadie spends most of his time studying the financial markets. He knew that he could take the same mathematical tools that he uses to value an unusual security and apply them to golf. But first he needed the data. Around 10 years ago, he started keeping track of the rounds that he played with his friends and colleagues. He didn’t just record standard stats such as his total number of putts and the number of fairways he hit. He created something that, with the PGA Tour’s ShotLink not yet in existence, nobody had thought to construct: a database that allowed him to enter the precise coordinates of every shot that he and his golf buddies struck.
Broadie’s collection has since grown to include more than 65,000 shots from golfers as young as 8 and as old as their 70s, with rounds as low as 61 and as high as 150. Thanks to his golf shot database, Broadie was able to do away with the old-fashioned, simplistic stats we hear about on TV and figure out how the game is truly played. Just as baseball’s statistical pioneers overthrew the tyranny of ERA and RBI by developing more meaningful metrics, Broadie saved golf from GIR with a concept called “shot value.”
The foundation of shot value is the idea that, once you have a huge database of golf shots, it’s possible to set a benchmark for performance from every position on the course. Broadie uses the scratch golfer (someone who shoots par) as his benchmark. Using the data he collected, he determined how many strokes it would take a scratch golfer, on average, to get the ball in the hole from every inch of turf—everywhere from the first tee to the bunker that guards the 18th green.
Imagine that you are standing in the fairway with a 150-foot approach shot to the green. You look down, and instead of a yardage marker, you see a stake with the number 2.5. That’s the average number of strokes it takes a scratch golfer to hole out from that spot. Picture these same sorts of markers everywhere. The tee box on a difficult par 4 may say 4.6. A 60-yard sand shot may have a 2.7 marker, and so on.
Once you have a benchmark “fractional par” value for every point on a course, you can figure out the value of every single shot. In a paper presented at the World Scientific Congress of Golf (PDF), Broadie gives the example of a 140-yard par 3 that plays, for the scratch golfer, like a par 3.2. Let’s say a golfer hits his tee shot to within 14 feet, moving from a location where it takes an average of 3.2 strokes to hole out to a spot where it takes an average of 1.8 strokes to finish. The simple arithmetic to determine the value of the shot: 3.2 - 1.8 - 1 (for the stroke that was taken) = 0.4. The superb approach shot has given our fictional golfer a four-tenths of a stroke advantage over a scratch golfer.(11 sep 2010)
I love this quote from security expert Bruce Schneier:
Remember, if it’s in the news don’t worry about it. The
very definition of news is “something that almost never
happens.” When something is so common that it’s no longer
news — car crashes, domestic violence — that’s when you
should worry about it.
the trouble with picking just one charitable cause. think of those ads where someone famous publicizes a very rare disease. i have some knee-jerk objection to that sort of thing — something like, why that one and not something else? why not something broader and systemic?… how does that relate to an aversion to specialize (careerwise)?(09 sep 2010)
These days, respect for the court must be grounded on other factors. Opinion writing is largely delegated to clerks, and Chief Justice Rehnquist candidly acknowledged that the justices’ chambers were “a collection of nine autonomous opinion-writing bureaus.”
With the departure of Justice Stevens, it appears that none of the justices routinely write first drafts of their opinions. Instead, they typically supervise and revise drafts produced by their clerks.
A few decades ago, the court decided 150 cases a term. That number has dropped by about half, meaning each justice must write about eight majority opinions a term. Yet the practice of entrusting much of the drafting to clerks remains entrenched.
“We have created an institutional situation where 26-year-olds are being given humongous legal authority in the actual wording of decisions, the actual compositional choices,” Professor Garrow said.
The justices forbid their current clerks to talk to the press, and most former clerks refuse to discuss the work they performed for living justices in any detail. But Artemus Ward and David L. Weiden received responses from 122 former clerks to a question concerning the drafting of opinions for their 2006 book “Sorcerers’ Apprentices.” Thirty percent of the clerks said their drafts had been issued without modification at least some of the time.
Reviewing the book in The New Republic, Judge Posner, a close student of the court, wrote that “probably more than half the written output of the court is clerk-authored.”
What was interesting and powerful about Lipsey and Lancaster’s proof is that it produced the counterintuitive result that sometimes when one variable is constrained, the best policy choice will involve moving other variables away from their first-best values.(09 sep 2010)
That dope, as one might call it, is action, movement, and excitement; but more than that, keeping the audience occupied mentally. People think, for example, that pace is fast action, quick cutting, people running around, or whatever you will, and it is not really that at all. I think that pace in a film is made entirely by keeping the mind of the spectator occupied. You don’t need to have quick cutting, you don’t need to have quick playing, but you do need a very full story and the changing of one situation to another. You need the changing of one incident to another, so that all the time the audience’s mind is occupied.
Now so long as you can sustain that and not let up, then you have pace. That is why suspense is such a valuable thing, because it keeps the mind of the audience going.(09 sep 2010)
I have a friend who teaches at Cornell’s famous School of Hotel Administration; she has a lot of casino designer contacts. According to her, the carpets are deliberately designed to obscure and camouflage gambling chips that have fallen onto the floor. The casinos sweep up a huge number of these every night. So the carpets are just another source of revenue.
In the kitchen, cooks are hustling, directed by a program called Meal Pacing that White’s team introduced across the company two years ago. Traditionally, an expediter would try to ensure that meals for a given table were ready at the same time so the shrimp entrée didn’t sit at the window getting cold while the 14-ounce steak was still on the grill. Meal Pacing displays the optimal work flow for each party on eight screens in the kitchen and monitors each station’s progress, with color-coded warnings when one falls behind. The screens also show if the staff is meeting Darden’s one-minute rule: Food should arrive at the table within one minute of being ready. (Why America Is Addicted to Olive Garden | Page 4 | Fast Company)(09 sep 2010)
dancing: "i guess i'll just fire off some major muscle groups in a random order"(06 sep 2010)
In the normal version, someone leaves briefly while the remaining folks agree to choose a particular object that’s in the room. The returning person gets twenty questions to guess the agreed-upon object, with “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” being the classic opening gambit.
In Negative Twenty Questions, however, all the remaining folks privately pick their own objects, though the person returning doesn’t know this. In fact, as Murch observes, “Nobody knows what anyone else is thinking. The game proceeds regardless, which is where the fun begins.”
When returning Joe (let’s call him) asks the standard bigger-than-a-breadbox question, if the first person says no, then the other players, who may have selected objects that are bigger, now have to look around the room for something that fits the definition. And if “Is it Hollow?” is Joe’s next question, then any of the players who chose new and unfortunately solid objects now have to search around for a new appropriate object. As Murch says, “a complex vortex of decision making is set up, a logical but unpredictable chain of ifs and thens.” Yet somehow this steady improvisation finally leads—though not always, there’s the tension—to a final answer everyone can agree with, despite the odds.
DKE is famous for the balloon hack at the November 1982 Harvard-Yale football game. That hack received more publicity than any other hack in the history of MIT. See Technique ’83 for details. DKE had tried to hack the game before, most memorably in the late 1940s when they buried explosive cord in a pattern that would spell out “MIT”. Unfortunately, Harvard discovered the hack and set up a trap. They arrested several students wearing coats lined with batteries. A dean, who had been informed about the hack after the arrest, went down to bail the students out. He pointed out to the detective that the battery-lined coats were only circumstantial evidence. At this point the dean opened his own battery-lined coat and declared that “all Tech men carry batteries.” ()(04 sep 2010)
hacking art into an art gallery:
James Tetazoo’s “No Knife: A study in mixed media earth tones, number three” appeared overnight at an exhibit in the List Visual Arts Center and recieved rave reviews. This objet d’art consisted of a grey commons tray set with two spoons, a plate, a bowl, a tumbler and a fork … but no knife.
What does a man love more than life?
Hate more than death or mortal strife?
That which contented men desire,
The poor have, the rich require,
The miser spends, the spendthrift saves,
And all men carry to their graves?
(Leemings, 1953, 201)
The answer, Nothing, can only be seen through a kaleidoscope
of equivocations.
Carnap also needs to consider the possibility that Heidegger’s
sentences are illuminating nonsense. After all, Carnap was
patient with the cryptic Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein speaks
like an oracle. He even
characterized his carefully enumerated sentences as rungs in a ladder that must be cast away after we have made the ascent and achieved an ineffable insight. And Wittgenstein meant it,
quitting philosophy to serve as a lowly schoolmaster in a rural village. (Nothingness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy))(03 sep 2010)
Henri Bergson maintained that nothingness is precluded by the
positive nature of reality. The absence of a female pope is not a brute
fact. ‘There is not a female pope’ is made true by a
positive fact such as the Catholic Church’s regulation that all priests
be men and the practice of drawing popes from the priesthood. Once we
have the positive facts and the notion of negation, we can derive all
the negative facts. ‘There is nothing’ would be a
contingent, negative fact. But then it would have to be grounded on
some positive reality. That positive reality would ensure that there is
something rather than nothing.
Human beings have a strong intuition that positive truths, such as
‘Elephants are huge’ are more fundamental than negative
truths such as ‘Elephants do not jump’. The robustness of
this tendency makes negative things objects of amusement. Consider the
Professor’s remark during his chilly banquet in Lewis Carroll’s
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.
“I hope you’ll enjoy the dinner—such as it is; and
that you won’t mind the heat—such as it isn’t.”
The sentence sounded well, but somehow I couldn’t quite
understand it … (chapter 22)
How can we perceive absences? They seem causally inert and so not
the sort of thing that we could check empirically. Negative truths seem
redundant; there are no more truths than those entailed by the
conjunction of all positive truths. The negative truths seem
psychological; we only assert negative truths to express a frustrated
expectation. When Jean Paul Sartre (1969, 41) arrives late for his
appointment with Pierre at the cafe, he sees the absence of Pierre but
not the absence of the Duke of Wellington.
‘There might be nothing’ is false when read
epistemically. (Roughly, a proposition is epistemically possible if it
is consistent with everything that is known.) For we know that
something actually exists and knowledge of actuality
precludes epistemic possibility. But when read metaphysically,
‘There might be nothing’ seems true. So ‘Why is
there something rather than nothing?’ is, so far, a live
question.
All material things are concrete but some concrete things
might be immaterial. Shadows and holes have locations and durations but
they are not made of anything material. There is extraneous light in
shadows and extraneous matter in holes; but these are contaminants
rather than constituents. If there are souls or Cartesian minds, then
they will also qualify as immaterial, concrete entities. Although they
do not take up space, they take up time. An idealist such as George
Berkeley could still ask ‘Why is there is something rather than
nothing?’ even though he was convinced that material things are
not possible.
Although all concrete things are in space or time, neither space nor
time are concrete things. Where would space be? When would time occur?
These questions can only be answered if space were contained in
another higher space. Time would be dated within another time. Since
the same questions can be posed for higher order space and higher
order time, we would face an infinite regress.
There is no tradition of wondering ‘Why is there space and
time?’. One reason is that space and time seem like a framework
for there being any contingent things.
Absolutists think of the framework as existing independently of what
it frames. For instance, Newton characterized space as an eternal,
homogenous, three dimensional container of infinite extent. He
believed that the world was empty of objects for an infinite period
prior to creation (setting aside an omnipresent God). An empty world
would merely be a continuation of what creation interrupted.
Others think the framework depends on what it frames. Like Leibniz,
Albert Einstein pictured (or “pictured”) space as an abstraction from
relations between objects. Consequently, space can be described with
the same metaphors we use for family trees. Maybe space grows
bigger. Maybe space is curved or warped or has holes. There is much
room to wonder why space has properties that it has. But since space
is an abstraction from objects, answers to any riddles about space
reduce to facts about objects. One can wonder why there is space. But
this is only to wonder why there are objects.
If the explanation cannot begin with some entity, then it is hard to
see how any explanation is feasible. Some philosophers conclude
‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ is
unanswerable. They think the question stumps us by imposing an
impossible explanatory demand, namely, Deduce the existence of
something without using any existential premises. Logicians should
feel no more ashamed of their inability to perform this deduction than
geometers should feel ashamed at being unable to square the circle.
Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.’
And as the wiki expanded, more and more WikiWords that you invented -
planning to fill it in next - turned out to already exist, and to already
have the content you meant to write. The WikiWord effect is kind of magical
that way. It’s really fun and rewarding when it happens. (apenwarr - Business is Programming)(02 sep 2010)
I’ve done a specific study of the Low Countries, and there, something like 40 percent of all the books published before 1600 would have taken less than two days to print. That’s a phenomenal market, and it’s a very productive one for the printers. These are the sort of books they want to produce, tiny books. Very often they’re not even trying to sell them retail. They’re a commissioned book for a particular customer, who might be the town council or a local church, and they get paid for the whole edition. And those are the people who tended to stay in business in the first age of print. (Cover story - The Boston Globe)(01 sep 2010)
In the 19th century, Europeans used to call Africa the Dark Continent. Today, as some cultures get amplified and distributed in accelerated ways, thanks to the (still largely-Anglo) Internet, parts of the world are going digitally dark. Russia among them. It isn’t about poor connectivity or infrastructure. It is about bits dying if they are not actively traded. Russia as an idea seems to be fading in the global consciousness far faster than you would expect. This isn’t just the normal rise and fall of empires. In the age of the Internet, there are only two continents: the main, harshly-floodlit continent, and the digital Dark Continent. The former is about the bit-churn at the forefront of the Real-Time Web. The latter is about forgotten empires, hard-to-find books, and young people furiously striving to make an American buck. Dying empires in centuries past used to live on, like spent supernovae, in what came after. Graves were respected spaces. But the biases of the Internet interrupt that natural process of cultural reincarnation, and cause a more complete forgetting. If a memory isn’t online, it doesn’t exist. If a culture dies, tweets from the vigorous, living cultures flood the resulting global attention vacuum before any process of local regeneration can begin. Bits that aren’t constantly churning in the Real-Time Web are dead bits. Memories of Soviet Russia are dead bits. The dead-bit graves of the Internet are not respected spaces.(01 sep 2010)
suppose that cryogenics could work, and that you will be among those preserved. now you have some real skin in the game: what you do with your life before the freeze could very well impact the course of history to such an extent that your actions today could, in a crazy kind of boomerang causality, either have the effect of waking you up or putting you to sleep forever.(31 aug 2010)
the story of the birth of science, of the awakening of mankind, is really the story of a small group of people looking up at the stars and giving a shit, enough to write down what they saw and create new tools to take a closer look.(31 aug 2010)
One last word. Although we FARGonauts devise, implement, test, and revise computer models of thought processes, we do not consider ourselves to be carrying out artificial-intelligence research. The reason for this is that we are only trying to understand what human minds do; we build our models not in order to make computers “smarter” but in order to understand more clearly the huge gulf that lies between computers in their standard incarnations and human minds. Thus whereas many AI researchers want to make programs that avoid errors like the plague, we are interested in precisely the opposite. We are delighted when our programs make clumsy, stupid errors — we rejoice in such “fluidity”. Indeed, we want our programs to be able to be confused, blurry, totally lost, and frustrated. We hope, one day, that our programs might have just the barest glimmerings of a sense of humor, and in the midst of their own confused flailings, would be able to recognize how pathetic are their efforts, and to laugh at themselves. That would be a happy day for us FARGonauts.
The philosophy behind our vision of thinking is that the crucial task of brains is, figuratively speaking, to “put their fingers on the essence of the situations facing them”, and that this is done by what we call “high-level perception”. That means that we FARGonauts (as we, with deliberate humor, call ourselves) see a smooth continuum running from, at the lower end, the recognition of the color red, to the recognition of a red apple on a brown table, to the recognition of breakfast on a countertop, to the recognition of a mess in the back seat of our car, to the recognition of a mess in a friend’s romantic relationship, to the recognition of the vast web of implications of a friend’s potential divorce, to the recognition of the profound irony of the fact that the surgeon is now dying of the very disease that she herself cured so many times in her life, and so forth and so on. Needless to say, the latter examples get closer and closer to the “high end” of the spectrum of high-level perception.
Our belief is that this kind of “seeing” (which obviously transcends any traditional “sensory modality”, such as vision or hearing or touch) is the core of human thought, and that it is carried out by the mechanisms of analogy-making. We very deliberately avoid saying “analogical reasoning”, because to us that extremely standard, traditional expression is loaded with all sorts of unwanted and misleading connotations. To us, the making of analogies means nothing more and nothing less than recognizing in something “before us” (not necessarily before our eyes, however) what it most centrally “is”. This means making a link between two mental structures, one being the imperfect, crude representation that we have (so far) built up of this situation, and the other being a pre-stored mental representation of another situation from our past (or, just as often, if not much more often, a pre-stored mental representation of a bunch of situations from our past — which is to say, a known concept). We FARGonauts do not draw any distinction between a memory of one event or situation, and a memory of a number of similar situations (i.e., a concept) — in fact, we see a memory of one event or situation as constituting every bit as much a genuine concept as is the blurry superposition of a hundred similar situations (which seems more like the traditional notion of what a concept is, although sometimes such a superposition is called a “schema”, a term that to our eyes muddies up the waters considerably).
The classifier examines the independent features of an item, and compares those against the features (and classification) of previous items to deduce the likely classification of the new item.
It is ‘naïve’ because the features are assessed independently. For example, we may have hundreds of data points that classify animals. If we have a new data point:
4 legs
65kg weight
60cm height
Each feature might be independently classified as:
Dog
Human
Dog
Although the overall result (“probably a dog”) is likely correct, note that it didn’t remove/discount “human” from the classification of weight when it saw that it had 4 legs (and no human had been classified with 4 legs in previous data) – because of the “naivety” of the algorithm.
Harper’s Magazine (also called Harper’s) is a monthly, left-leaning[1], general-interest magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts. It is the second-oldest, continuously-published monthly magazine in the U.S. (Scientific American is the oldest)(27 aug 2010)
Like so much of the drama in the Middle East, it all sounds a bit familiar: Israel, beset by enemies, striking out preemptively; the United States supporting Israel, but frustrated by the measures Israel deems necessary to ensure its security; the word holocaust deployed, maybe a little too casually; Armageddon pacing in the wings; peace in the role of Godot. (Nuclear Options - Magazine - The Atlantic)(26 aug 2010)
That, for me, sums up the seductive intellectual core of computers and computer programming: here is a magic black box. You can tell it to do whatever you want, within a certain set of rules, and it will do it; within the confines of the box you are more or less God, your powers limited only by your imagination. But the price of that power is strict discipline: you have to really know what you want, and you have to be able to express it clearly in a formal, structured way that leaves no room for the fuzzy thinking and ambiguity found everywhere else in life. The computer is an invaluably remorseless master: harsh, sometimes to the point of causing you to tear your hair out, but never unfair. If something you tried doesn’t work, then you made a mistake (somewhere). The sense of freedom on offer - the ability to make the machine dance to any tune you care to play - is thrilling. And the discipline of expressing your throughts in remorseless, rigorous logic is wonderfu mental exercise. (Computing in schools: Teach computing, not Word | The Economist)(26 aug 2010)
“How many man-years did it take to write QuickDraw?”, the Byte magazine reporter asked Steve.
Steve turned to look at Bill. “Bill, how long did you spend writing Quickdraw?”
“Well, I worked on it on and off for four years”, Bill replied.
Steve paused for a beat and then turned back to the Byte reporter. “Twenty-four man-years. We invested twenty-four man-years in QuickDraw.”(26 aug 2010)
I think Douglas Adams talked about how he used that phrase in Salmon of Doubt:
“Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression ‘it turns out’ to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great. It’s hugely better than its predecessors ‘I read somewhere that…’ or the craven ‘they say that…’ because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it’s research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight.”(26 aug 2010)
thinking that toothpaste's "a pea-sized amount" referred to something technical, and then learning that it referred to the vegetable, as the canonical example of taking the world to be more magical than it is(25 aug 2010)
I’ll take a stab at this.
Imagine that your matrix is a cube of Jello. Give it a poke with your finger (vector). When you poke it in some directions, the Jello will wobble this way and that, but if you poke it from a particular direction, it will move only in the direction—i.e., you’ve just pushed it away. That direction is like an eigenvector.
Another, similar, analogy comes to mind. Think of a very simple house of cards, with two vertical cards and one roof across the top. If you push it from the side, it kind of topples—that is, a simple push results in a shear transformation. But if you push it from the top down, the force is directly transmitted into the table, with no change in direction. That’s also like an eigenvector.
I don’t know if this is what you’re looking for, but this kind of thing is key to my view of mathematics… In day-to-day conversation, I’ll sometimes refer to something as an eigen____. While only loosely correct in some cases, I think using mathematical language this way has also made some much more advanced mathematical concepts much easier for me to understand.
That said, if I actually need to solve a problem analytically, I reach for a pencil and paper like anyone else.
To discover in the course of research some engaging detail we know can be put into a story where it will do some good can hardly be classed as a felonious act— it is simply what we do. The worst you can call itis a form of primate behavior. Writers are naturally drawn, chimpanzee-like, to the color and the music of this English idiom we are blessed to have inherited. When given the choice we will usually try to use the more vivid and tuneful among its words. I cannot of course speak for Mr. McEwan’s method of proceeding, but should be very surprised indeed if something of the sort, even for brief moments, had not occurred during his research for Atonement. Gentian violet! Come on. Who among us could have resisted that one?(24 aug 2010)
dly enough, most of us who write historical fiction do feel some obligation to accuracy. It is that Ruskin business about “a capacity responsive to the claims of fact, but unoppressed by them.”(24 aug 2010)
Some scientists would argue that this ambivalence reflects what is going on in the brain, which is also both grown-up and not-quite-grown-up. Neuroscientists once thought the brain stops growing shortly after puberty, but now they know it keeps maturing well into the 20s. This new understanding comes largely from a longitudinal study of brain development sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, which started following nearly 5,000 children at ages 3 to 16 (the average age at enrollment was about 10). The scientists found the children’s brains were not fully mature until at least 25. “In retrospect I wouldn’t call it shocking, but it was at the time,” Jay Giedd, the director of the study, told me. “The only people who got this right were the car-rental companies.” (What Is It About 20-Somethings? - NYTimes.com)(24 aug 2010)
Mr. Walker represents (or gives a fine imitation of) the “nervous cluelessness” that modern grammar teaching generates in its victims. He’s uneasy about this case, I conjecture, because two shibboleths intersect: “me vs. I” and “like vs. as”.
One of the old but vital aphorisms of American politics is that Americans are ideological conservatives but operational liberals. They oppose government in the abstract, but favor it in most of the particulars. (The primary exceptions being programs seen as benefitting only the poor, only the rich, or only foreigners.)(24 aug 2010)
How is the idea of public reason relevant to legal theory? One answer to this question might begin with Rawls’s observation that judicial reasoning, for example the reasoning of the Supreme Court, exemplifies public reason. It would be unusual to see a Supreme Court justice rely on a particular religion or on a deep philosophical view about the meaning of life or the ultimate nature of the good. There are exceptions, however. One of the most infamous Supreme Court opinions in the contemporary period is Chief Justice Burger’s concurring opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, the case that was recently overruled in Lawrence v. Texas. Burger argued that criminalization of homosexual conduct was constitutionally permissible, because the prohibition on such conduct was rooted in Judeo-Christian morality. Arguably this argument exceeded the bounds of public reason, because the United States is a pluralist society in which there are many citizens outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition, including, for example, Buddhists, adherents of Native American religions, and nonbelievers.
One of the interesting features of the idea of public reason is that it provides an argumentagainst what we might call going deep in legal theory. By going deep, I mean making arguments that rely on deep philosophical premises, about ultimate values on the one hand ormetaethicsand moral psychology on the other. So, for example, it might be argued that utilitarianism (or welfare economics) is an inappropriate source of legal arguments, when the argument relies on a deep utilitarian premises, such as the notion that only utility (e.g. hedonic value or preference satisfaction) is valuable. That premise, it might be argued, goes beyond public reason.
The idea of public reason is deeply controversial and the subject of heated debate, but the connections between public reason and law have only recently begun to be explored in depth.(24 aug 2010)
To ferret out those wow items, Trader Joe’s has four top buyers, called product developers, do some serious globetrotting. A former senior executive told me that Trader Joe’s biggest R&D expense is travel for those product-finding missions. (Inside the secret world of Trader Joe’s - Aug. 23, 2010)(24 aug 2010)
A closer look at its selection of items underscores the brilliance of Coulombe’s limited-selection, high-turnover model. Take peanut butter. Trader Joe’s sells 10 varieties. That might sound like a lot, but most supermarkets sell about 40 SKUs. For simplicity’s sake, say both a typical supermarket and a Trader Joe’s sell 40 jars a week. Trader Joe’s would sell an average of four of each type, while the supermarket might sell only one. With the greater turnover on a smaller number of items, Trader Joe’s can buy large quantities and secure deep discounts. And it makes the whole business — from stocking shelves to checking out customers — much simpler.
story: the day NASA announces it has found an uncontactable green planet. (the point would concern its mere existence and the effect that would have on us.)(24 aug 2010)
When the bubble burst, Japan lost paper wealth of $16 trillion, or three times its annual gross domestic product—far more as a share of GDP than the world suffered in the latest financial crisis. The crisis exposed or exacerbated ugly elements of Japanese society that had been swept under the tatami mat, from its high rate of suicides and domestic violence to bureaucratic bungling and dishonesty. For instance, it fairly recently came to light that 50m pension records had been lost, a disaster that was hidden from the public for more than a decade. (Social change in Japan: When the myths are blown away | The Economist)(22 aug 2010)
no more white pages, thanks to these cell phones(22 aug 2010)
The best evidence for a neural mechanism for déjà vu, which around 60 percent of people experience at least once, comes from studies of patients who experience it chronically. In 2005 cognitive neuropsychologists at the University of Leeds in England described two patients with recurring and persistent feelings of déjà vu. The patients refused to read a newspaper or watch television because they felt as if they had already seen it all before. They found it difficult to shop for groceries because they thought they had just purchased those items. The researchers discovered that these patients had damage to their frontal and temporal regions. Harm to these areas likely caused the patients’ familiarity circuitry to fire frequently, even when they were in a novel situation. In undamaged brains, déjà vu likely occurs because of processing errors in these same regions. (What is going on in the brain when we experience déjà vu?: Scientific American)(21 aug 2010)
I knew that ancient architecture was usually vividly painted, but it didn’t occur to me that the statues might be as well. The interesting thing is how nowadays we model buildings and statues after our notion of what classical art looked like, but the models were never intended to look like that. It’s almost cargo-cultish, in its own way. Of course, the non-color elements like the shapes and the proportions still stand through, and those are definitely worthy of study. But painting such a sculpture or building like this would probably be outright offensive to some people.
The color-restored versions somehow look less… impressive with the colors on, but that could be just because I’m used to thinking of the colorless versions as more regal. On the other hand, black-and-white photographs look more artistic as well, so it could be something about the lack of color itself.
My life and fortunes are a monstrosity,
Partly because of Hera, partly because of my beauty.
If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect
The way you would wipe color off a statue.
Strange as it seems to our modern eyes, they really did consider this beautiful. I’d guess that such bright colors were rare (and expensive) back then, so anything that vivid would have been extraordinary.
Microwave radiation is between common radio and infrared frequencies. Water, fat, and other substances in the food absorb energy from the microwaves in a process called dielectric heating. Many molecules (such as those of water) are electric dipoles, meaning that they have a positive charge at one end and a negative charge at the other, and therefore rotate as they try to align themselves with the alternating electric field of the microwaves. This molecular movement represents heat which is then dispersed as the rotating molecules hit other molecules and put them into motion. (Microwave oven - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(19 aug 2010)
On October 8, 1945 Raytheon filed a U.S. patent for Spencer’s microwave cooking process and an oven that heated food using microwave energy was placed in a Boston restaurant for testing. In 1947, the company built the Radarange, the first microwave oven in the world.[3] It was almost 1.8 metres (5.9 ft) tall, weighed 340 kilograms (750lb) and cost about US$5000 each. It consumed 3 kilowatts, about three times as much as today’s microwave ovens, and was water-cooled. An early commercial model introduced in 1954 consumed 1.6 kilowatts and sold for US$2000 to US$3000. Raytheon licensed its technology to the Tappan Stove company in 1952. They tried to market a large, 220 volt, wall unit as a home microwave oven in 1955 for a price of US$1295, but it did not sell well. In 1965 Raytheon acquired Amana. In 1967 they introduced the first popular home model, the countertop Radarange, at a price of US$495.
The heating effect of microwaves was discovered accidentally in 1945. Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer from Howland, Maine, was building magnetrons for radar sets with the American company Raytheon. He was working on an active radar set when he noticed that a peanut chocolate bar he had in his pocket started to melt. The radar had melted his chocolate bar with microwaves. The first food to be deliberately cooked with Spencer’s microwave was popcorn, and the second was an egg, which exploded in the face of one of the experimenters.[1][2] To verify his finding, Spencer created a high density electromagnetic field by feeding microwave power into a metal box from which it had no way to escape. When food was placed in the box with the microwave energy, the temperature of the food rose rapidly. (Microwave oven - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(19 aug 2010)
This “sir, yes sir” business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaftoe had trouble with military etiquette at first. He soaked up quite a bit of it growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter. Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process. The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gung-ho posture says that once you give the order I’m not going to bother you with any of the details—and your half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officer’s shoulders by the subordinate’s unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders.(19 aug 2010)
Let me make this more concrete. Perry notes that, in 1964, Radio Shack sold a stereo system nobody today would want for $379.95. 1964 also happens to be the year my parents started college at the University of Michigan. According to Michigan’s Bentley Library, in-state tuition that year for freshmen and sophomores was $140 ($155 for juniors and seniors.) So, a stereo cost more than a year of college in Ann Arbor. Is life so much better now? Yes if you’re a middle-class person who wants a stereo. No, if you’re a middle-class person who wants a college degree. Now, most people today would consider a college education overwhelmingly more valuable than a stereo, and find it hard to believe that there was a time when the latter was comparably priced eith the former.(18 aug 2010)
Is it possible to be a humble and yet fierce advocate? To say, in effect: I like making arguments of this sort – based on these premises, in defense of these groups or interests, on the side of this intellectual tradition, etc. – and I don’t intend to make arguments that “belong” to the other side, because I believe that my side deserves the best representation it can possibly get. And yet: I know that my own arguments are not complete, precisely because they are merely arguments, part of the process of getting to truth rather than the truth itself. Is it possible to advocate in that spirit and still advocate effectively?(18 aug 2010)
WHAT IS IT?
This model is an attempt to mimic the flocking of birds. (The resulting motion also resembles schools of fish.) The flocks that appear in this model are not created or led in any way by special leader birds. Rather, each bird is following exactly the same set of rules, from which flocks emerge.
HOW IT WORKS
The birds follow three rules: “alignment”, “separation”, and “cohesion”.
“Alignment” means that a bird tends to turn so that it is moving in the same direction that nearby birds are moving.
“Separation” means that a bird will turn to avoid another bird which gets too close.
“Cohesion” means that a bird will move towards other nearby birds (unless another bird is too close).
When two birds are too close, the “separation” rule overrides the other two, which are deactivated until the minimum separation is achieved.
The three rules affect only the bird’s heading. Each bird always moves forward at the same constant speed.
MITCHELL: Language, that was the biggest baddest mistake really, Terry. What language are these people speaking? If you try to get it right, if you try to get authentic 18th century speech you end up sounding like “Black Adder,” you end up sounding like pastiche. If, on the other hand, you don’t, you don’t convince your reader that the language, you know, smells authentic, then - bubble of fiction is popped because the reader’s thinking, hang on, this sounds like speech that could have been from a sitcom I saw last week.
So you have to sort of create what I came to think of as a bygone-ese kind of dialect, which is not in fact completely plausible. It doesn’t really work if you have characters using the word harken, for example. But which still smells and has the right texture of 18th century speech. And it’s tough to do that. It’s tough to work out exactly how to do it.
GROSS: And then you have to be consistent once you’ve figured it out.
Mr. MITCHELL: Oh, you have to be consistent. And then, of course, you have to avoid the trap where my rather large cast in this book - I think someone worked out there’s about 150 speaking parts in it - they mustn’t all sound the same because that also pricks the bubble of fiction. That also makes the reader think, well, why are all these people speaking the same voice? That doesn’t happen in life. So you have to work out bygone-ese but then subdivide it amongst the Dutch, the Japanese, the British.
Within our company, we’ve built lots of custom internal utilities, often based on Mathematica and webMathematica. I’ve also had systems built for me personally. One of the more important is my archiving and searching system, which includes 25 years of email (and 20 years of keystroke data), as well as searchable scans of all my archived paper documents. (An interview with Stephen Wolfram: The Setup)(17 aug 2010)
highlighting summary sentences instead of examples, the stuff in the middle of paragraphs(17 aug 2010)
the way pornography crowds out imagination(17 aug 2010)
I wonder if this could be used as a Gödel patent. If you had a patent on patent trolling, it could be a weapon for patent reform: go around suing patent trolls. Either you win, in which case trolling ceases to be a viable business model, or you lose, setting a precedent for the argument that patents on business methods aren’t valid. Either way, you tie up patent trolls in unproductive litigation, force them to argue against the current state of the patent system, and put a spotlight on the ridiculousness of the status quo.
He's got Nechtr pegged. Nechtr's that radiant distant type that it's just impossible to tell if he's putting you on, usually. So what the hell is he doing with this unsavory girl who looks way worse than her photo and says she's currently working on a poem consisting entirely of punctuation? Who has a face like a… a long face? Who wears synthetic green? Was it a planned pregnancy? Shotgun wedding? The shotgun has yet to be invented that could get Sternberg to marry the D.L. this D.L. has turned out to be, somebody one eerily fuck of a lot like Mrs. Sternberg, the sort of person who, if you visited her house, she'd smile the whole time you were there, then clean vigorously after you left. A cosmic nyet to that. Plus her tits it turns out can't be any bigger than they were that one childish day, that one single commercial either of them have ever been alumni of. Why didn't Nechtr just offer to pay for the abortion? Are Tinitarians pro-Life? Plus she smells weird — orangy on top and then a whiff of something dead and preserved underneath. Let's face it. She looks like her vagina would smell bad.(16 aug 2010)
That’s one of the canonical dumb investor questions. We try not to ask those. Google could blow most startups out of the water if they chose to focus on building exactly the same thing. What protects startups is that in practice big competitors can only focus on a limited number of things at once.
User indifference is a much, much greater danger for startups than competitors, big or small. So we advise startups to focus on that. What’s going to kill you is the Back button, not Google.
Politicians are in charge of the modern economy in much the same way as a sailor is in charge of a small boat in a storm. The consequences of their losing control completely may be catastrophic (as civil war and hyperinflation in parts of the former Soviet empire have recently reminded us), but even while they keep afloat, their influence over the course of events is tiny in comparison with that of the storm around them. We who are their passengers may focus our hopes and fears upon them, and express profound gratitude toward them if we reach harbor safely, but that is chiefly because it seems pointless to thank the storm. (p. 25)(14 aug 2010)
The extended version of Independence Day features a scene explaining how they managed to upload a virus onto the alien mothership by using a laptop. Apparently, the Earth technology is compatible with the ones Aliens have due to it being reverse-engineered from the Roswell UFO (same as with Megatron from live-action Transformers).
NP-complete problems are studied because the ability to quickly verify solutions to a problem (NP) seems to correlate with the ability to quickly solve that problem (P). It is not known whether every problem in NP can be quickly solved—this is called the P = NP problem. But if any single problem in NP-complete can be solved quickly, then every problem in NP can also be quickly solved, because the definition of an NP-complete problem states that every problem in NP must be quickly reducible to every problem in NP-complete (that is, it can be reduced in polynomial time). Because of this, it is often said that the NP-complete problems are harder or more difficult than NP problems in general.
For my own workaday purposes, the most useful recent invention has been the Livescribe Pulse pen, which I bought just after its introduction early last year and now can hardly be without. It looks like a somewhat bulky, cigar-shaped metallic writing instrument. Inside it contains a high-end audio recording system and assorted computer circuitry. When you turn it on, it starts recording what you are hearing—and also matches what is being said, instant by instant (in fact, using photos it takes 72 times per second), with notes or drawings that you’re making in a special Livescribe notebook. The result is a kind of indexing system for an audio stream. If a professor is explaining a complex equation during a lecture, you write “equation,” or anything else—and later when you click on that term, either in the original notebook or on images of the pages transferred to your computer screen, it plays back that exact part of the discussion. (Works on both Macs and PCs.) For me this means instant access to the three interesting sentences—I just write “interesting!” in the notebook or put a star—in the typical hour-long journalistic interview. The battery lasts for several full days’ use between recharges, and the pen can hold dozens of hours of recordings. (The Atlantic :: Magazine :: The Pen Gets Mightier)(12 aug 2010)
It’s mostly a stylistic thing. Ligatures grew out of handwriting styles. Back before the printing press, many scribes joined letters together to increase writing speed (like cursive handwriting). When the printing press came along, it kept up the tradition; in fact, since ligatures were so common in handwriting, it would’ve been weird to not use them. It was also beneficial because it helped protect letters. The dots in the letter “i” were very easy to break, so the ligature “fi” could help protect it.
Ligatures starting falling out of use in the 1950s for a few reasons. One, sans-serif fonts became much more common, and ligatures don’t look as nice in sans-serif typefaces. Two, low-cost printing machines became common, and didn’t require a professional typesetter. Three, computers came along, and desktop publishing boomed; ASCII and other early encodings didn’t have room for fancy ligatures. Unicode and OpenType have helped to reverse the trend, though.
So the simplest answer for the usage of ligatures in modern times is that it makes a publication or typeset manuscript look more professional.
We actually still use a lot of ligatures in English, although you might not recognize them as such; for example, “&” is actually a ligature for Latin word “et”, and “w” began as a ligature for “vv” or “uu”. In German, “ß” began life as a ligature but is now a wholly separate letter; umlauts (“ä”, “ë”, etc.) began as ligatures as well.
At the town center, in a crowded four-way intersection called the Laweiplein, Monderman removed not only the traffic lights but virtually every other traffic control. Instead of a space cluttered with poles, lights, “traffic islands,” and restrictive arrows, Monderman installed a radical kind of roundabout (a “squareabout,” in his words, because it really seemed more a town square than a traditional roundabout), marked only by a raised circle of grass in the middle, several fountains, and some very discreet indicators of the direction of traffic, which were required by law.
As I watched the intricate social ballet that occurred as cars and bikes slowed to enter the circle (pedestrians were meant to cross at crosswalks placed a bit before the intersection), Monderman performed a favorite trick. He walked, backward and with eyes closed, into the Laweiplein. The traffic made its way around him. No one honked, he wasn’t struck. Instead of a binary, mechanistic process—stop, go—the movement of traffic and pedestrians in the circle felt human and organic.
A year after the change, the results of this “extreme makeover” were striking: Not only had congestion decreased in the intersection—buses spent less time waiting to get through, for example—but there were half as many accidents, even though total car traffic was up by a third.
It’s entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of US fiction’s possibilities. The next real liter- ary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in US life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. (The Panic of Influence | The New York Review of Books)(12 aug 2010)
palpate (great word): Examine (a part of the body) by touch, esp. for medical purposes(12 aug 2010)
As mentioned before—and if this were a piece of metafiction, which it’s NOT, the exact number of typeset lines between this reference and the prenominate referent would very probably be mentioned, which would be a princely pain in the ass, not to mention cocky, since it would assume that a straightforward and anti-embellished account of a slow and hot and sleep-deprived and basically clotted and frustrating day in the lives of three kids, none of whom are all that sympathetic, could actually get published, which these days good luck, but in metafiction it would, nay needs be mentioned, a required postmodern convention aimed at drawing the poor old reader’s emotional attention to the fact that the narrative bought and paid for and now under time-consuming scrutiny is not in fact a barely-there window onto a different and truly diverting world, but rather in fact an “artifact,” an object, a plain old this-worldly thing, composed of emulsified wood pulp and horizontal chorus-lines of dye, and conventions, and is thus in a “deep” sense just an opaque forgery of a transfiguring window, not a real window, a gag, and thus in a deep (but intentional, now) sense artificial, which is to say fabricated, false, a fiction, a pretender-to-status, a straw-haired King of Spain—this self-conscious explicitness and deconstructed disclosure supposedly making said metafiction “realer” than a piece of pre-postmodern “Realism” that depends on certain antiquated techniques to create an “illusion” of a windowed access to a “reality” isomorphic with ours but possessed of and yielding up higher truths to which all authentically human persons stand in the relation of applicand—all of which the Resurrection of Realism, the pained product of inglorious minimalist labor in countless obscure graduate writing workshops across the U.S. of A., and called by Field Marshal Lish (who ought to know) the New Realism, promises to show to be utter baloney, this metafictional shit…. (The Panic of Influence | The New York Review of Books)(12 aug 2010)
Glowing, gleaming, or flickering with a soft radiance
"Don't put it in the catchup industry," said Harry.(12 aug 2010)
It’s the abstraction that gets me the most, platonic femininity—features that are peculiar to them, to hers and shes: physical attributes, gestures, psychosocial-emotional patterns whose semantic extension is exclusively girl.(12 aug 2010)
when i look at my clean empty desk, it's hard not to appreciate pg's take on brevity. this kind of simplicity works so much better.(12 aug 2010)
"If water derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of the mind! The mind of the sage, being in repose, becomes the mirror of the universe, the speculum of all creation.”(11 aug 2010)
A trap is for fish: when you’ve got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you’ve got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you’ve got the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find someone who’s forgotten words so I can have a word with him? (Zhuangzi - Wikiquote)(11 aug 2010)
physical version of a blog: a scraggly notebook with little headers and room for comments at the bottom of a page. links as strings tying a heap of notebooks and notebook pages together. problems that require "power cycles", i.e., closing and opening the thing a few times.(11 aug 2010)
the day in a life of a scientist who is about to launch gray goo(10 aug 2010)
a few thousand lines of extraordinarily abstract lisp that evolve a world when executed on your home machine(10 aug 2010)
To me though, this quote from the first season of Babylon Five by Sinclair sums it up for me:
“Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you’ll get ten different answers, but there’s one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us. It’ll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes…[and] all of this…all of this…was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.”
Robert Bringhurst wrote that writing is the solid form of language, the precipitate.(10 aug 2010)
“Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.”
- Seneca(10 aug 2010)
Walking was such a predictably good way to loosen up my creativity that when I got stuck I would head for the door and tell my wife, “I’m going to the convenience store to buy a joke.”(10 aug 2010)
I get really infuriated by the phrase “too much time on their hands”, when used to dismiss acts of creativity (like building a model of the Eiffel tower out of match sticks). At least they weren’t watching TV.(10 aug 2010)
Physical effects
It is common for soldiers to lose 20-40 pounds. Military folk wisdom has it that Ranger School’s physical toll is like years of natural aging; high levels of fight-or-flight stress hormones (epinephrine, norepinephrine, cortisol), along with standard sleep deprivation and continual physical strain, inhibit full physical and mental recovery throughout the course.
Common maladies during the course include weight loss, dehydration, trench foot, heatstroke, frostbite, chilblains, fractures, tissue tears (ligaments, tendons, muscles), swollen hands, feet, knees, nerve damage, loss of limb sensitivity, cellulitis, contact dermatitis, cuts, and insect, spider, bee, and wildlife bites.
Because of the physical and psychological effect of low calorie intake over an extended period of time, it is not uncommon for many Ranger School graduates to encounter weight problems as they return to their units and their bodies and minds slowly adjust to routine again. A drastically lowered metabolic rate, combined with a nearly insatiable appetite (the result of food deprivation and the ensuing survivalist mentality) can cause quick weight gain, as the body is already in energy (fat) storing mode.
A Ranger student’s diet and sleep are strictly controlled by the Ranger Instructors. During time in garrison students are given three meals a day, but forced to eat extremely quickly and without any talking. During field exercises Ranger students are given two MREs (Meal, Ready-to-eat) per day, but not allowed to eat them until given permission. Since food and sleep are at the bottom of an infantryman’s priorities of work behind security, weapons maintenance, and personal hygiene it is generally the last thing Ranger students are allowed to do. Each MRE has on average 1,200 calories, and Ranger students are infamous for eating every part of the MRE including sugar packets, coffee creamer, and salt. Commonly, Ranger students are incapable of eating every part of the MRE and must throw out significant portions of the meal. Though a 2,400 calorie diet would be enough to satisfy the average person, Ranger students are under such physical stress that this amount is insufficient and most students lose upwards of 20 pounds by the end of their training.
Grazing is the practice of surreptitiously eating food throughout the day in order to fight the normal hunger pains. This practice is strictly forbidden and being caught can lead to being given a major minus or being recycled.
Ranger students conduct about 20 hours of training per day, while consuming two or fewer meals daily totaling about 2,200Calories (9,200 kJ), with an average of 3.5 hours of sleep a day. Students sleep more before a parachute jump for safety considerations. Ranger students typically wear and carry some 65–90 pounds (29–41kg) of weapons, equipment, and training ammunition while patrolling more than 200 miles (320 km) throughout the course. (Ranger School - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(10 aug 2010)
“Whole Foods is actually a psychographic, not a demographic, said Paul Rossi, The Economist’s managing director and executive vice president for the Americas. “One of the things people say is, ‘You go after an affluent audience.’ But we don’t define our audience by their demographic. We define our audience based on what they think.”
By 1980, a lower bound of 18 had been established for God’s Number by
analyzing the number of effectively distinct move sequences of 17 or
fewer moves, and finding that there were fewer such sequences than
Cube positions. (God’s Number is 20)(09 aug 2010)
donald knuth on when the P v. NP problem will be resolved: "It will be solved by either 2048 or 4096."(08 aug 2010)
eating the roman way, reclined with a triangle(08 aug 2010)
mom not being too comfortable dragging and dropping on a trackpad(08 aug 2010)
Except, of course, for the (decidedly) high density of parenthetical adjuncts (I hate that hesitant style, constantly interrupting itself — modifying, or qualifying, itself — the way I’m doing, as an expository device, right now)(08 aug 2010)
morally important to me to do without minor characters in a story. Any character who appears, however briefly, deserves to have his or her life story fully respected and told.(08 aug 2010)
He believes that efforts to reenergize traditional marriage aren’t going to work because the notion of marriage has changed. From an arrangement meant to foster the rearing of children it has come to be seen as “a private relationship centered on the needs of adults for love and companionship.” (The Marrying Kind | The New York Review of Books)(08 aug 2010)
No doubt American piety and reverence for marriage have their origins in our national psyche for religious and other reasons that Cherlin outlines—but in practice, religious communities often have a high rate of divorce. The Bible-belt state of Arkansas has the second highest in the nation, after Nevada. Fundamentalist Christians have a somewhat higher divorce rate and higher turnover of live-in partners, maybe because this group also tends to have less education and lower income. The divorce rate among college-educated people has actually fallen in the past two or three decades. (The Marrying Kind | The New York Review of Books)(08 aug 2010)
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz
the fact that the iPhone doesn’t replace “tome” with “time”(08 aug 2010)
Besides, the life of a writer, is a lonely one. You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward.(07 aug 2010)
for instance, drew and I were discussing how most guys always have a handful of numbers that they have gotten from girls, but never did anything with them
so we proposed that one night everyone would have to call one of those numbers and see where the night goes
I would also like to underscore that the deveopment of such advanced cybernetic civilizations may be described as a logical abiological development of life as we know it. It may be that what we call civilization is merely an interemediate stage on the road to a far more advanced civilization, an intermediate and unstable step, moreover.(05 aug 2010)
Some excerpts from Palindromes and Anagrams by Bergerson:
There can be palindromes in which phrases are the units, or in which sentences, or lines of poetry, are the units, and still others in which the units are paragraphs or stanzas. It is only when the mathematical limit is reached—-when the whole poem, story, essay, or laundry list is taken as the unit—-that the palindromicness, having been increasingly attenuated at each successive step, at last completely vanishes.
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Anagrams may even provide interesting techniques for generating poetry. For example, suppose a first line to be freely written. The second line must then be an anagram of the first. The third line is again free, and so on. The theory is that the poet who writes in this form, due to the fact that when he writes a free line, he creates anagrammatical constraints for himself which will have an unpredictable influence on the next line, will inevitably invent poetry of a kind that he could not otherwise imagine. Once upon a time a romantic schoolgirl set pen to paper and, after careful thought, wrote as follows:
Now and then we met in dreamy rainbow bowers.
In the effort of anagramming, she found her modest talent considerably amplified, and the second line proved quite an improvement over the first:
Bonny hand at window---we twain remember Rose.
This, then, gave her the idea for her free third line—-which, consequently, took a totally unforeseen direction ("Her violets and cowslips had been her favorite flowers"). Ultimately, many hours and anagrams later, she ended it thus:
Wand wetted in elfish ethers, pickled in froth for two,
And sprinkled with the confetti of withered flowers.
and lastly, I can only say that it is beyond my poor power to calculate how much the existence of this book owes to the help and encouragement of my wife, Nellie Bergerson, an MS victim, who is, without a doubt (anagrammatically speaking), a serene, noble girl.
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Sydney Yendys was born, destined, preordained, doomed, to be a palindromist. His birth-year was 1881, an arrangement of figures which reads the same left to right, right to left, and upside down. He was christened Sydney, a reversal of the order of the letters of his surname. His first coherent utterance was "Dad-dad-dad-dad-dad-dad-dad-dad-dad!" followed in due course by "Mam-mam-mam-mam-mam-mam-mam-mam!" Later in his life he was to marry a girl called Edna, and to have a daughter, also named Edna. What more useful piece of equipment, in times of emergency, can a palindromist have than a pair of Ednas?
-
…He conceived of the idea of the palindrome to end all palindromes. He would write a full-length palindromic novel to be entitled "D'neeht." He began work on the project right away.
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I will try to elucidate for you, with all my sophistry—-and subterfuge—-mine own philosophical bent concerning some orthographic forms of poetry which are, indeed, matters of letters.
Palindromic poems have a credibility or incredibility very similar to the apparent facts of the mind-body riddle. Philosophers are forever asking: how is it possible for the Mind, which appears to have no similarity, in its principles, laws, structure—-indeed, in any way at all—-to the Thing the physicists are so feverishly studying, to inhabit this utterly dissimilar thing—-this "matter," to accommodate itself to its irrelevant and obstructive ways, and to even become on with it for a time? A like question could be asked about palindromes, for here the letters are orthographical atoms analogous to the physical atoms of our bodies, out of which the "body" of the palindrome is assembled, and throughout which sprawls its "soul," or meaning, just as if no home more comfortable or well-suited to its needs could possibly be devised. But these letters obey a law of symmetry, and, except that it is a simple single law, and a known law, it is entirely analogous to the laws of physical atom; it is a law irrelevant to, obstructive to, and unrelated to the entirely different laws of grammar, logic, drama and dreaming which govern those utterly different, quasi-living mental things called meanings; and it is a law which is indifferent to the collective elan or compulsion of those meanings to orchestrate themselves into unity with the orthographic atoms—-so as to become an embodied soul.
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Palindromes and charades suffer from the defect that the vocabulary available to them is severely limited. Indeed, most words cannot be used in either palindromes or charades at all. a most desirable innovation would be a form of composition as neat and appealing, as difficult and challenging, as are palindromes and charades, but in which any word would have as much chance to be used as any other. If only someone could find such a dragon, we could all try to slay it.
Recently a mathematical mode of collaboration having some of the earmarks of such a dragon has revealed a new dimension of most poignant interest in poetry—-that patient over which many doctors despair.
When a poet organizes significant sounds into poems, he engages in an activity which may be analyzed into two activities which are discussed in algebra textbooks under the familiar names: combinations and permutations. The poet selects one combination of words out of an infinite number of possible combinations. Simultaneously, he imparts to these words one permutation out of a finite but very large number of possible permutations. But, although the poet does both things together, it is imaginable that they could be done sequentially; the combination could be completely chosen first, and the permuting done afterwards. The writing of a poem could be divided into two parts—-the first poet selecting the combination of words and the second poet permuting the words into a poem.
One way to select a combination of words for the purpose is to take a poem which has already been written in the old hat way (it is best not to have a complete break with tradition), and then dissolve the poem by arranging all its words in a single alphabetical order. This list may then be given to another poet whose task it is to reconstruct the words into a poem.
An interesting upshot of all this is that it provides a means by which the living can collaborate with the dead.
To separate a word or longer expression into the letters of which it is composed is to dissolve it semantically, since the letters are submorphemic units. To rearrange the same letters into a new expression related in meaning to the original, thus restoring something like the original content (but without restoring any of the original morphemes), is perhaps the most fascinating of the anagrammatical arts.(05 aug 2010)
Alan Turing got the idea for the stored-program computer from his own systematic introspection into his mental states when dutifully executing an algorithm, the sort of mental activity that is farthest removed from artistic, creative thought. He saw that the restriction to rigid problem-solving was an inessential feature of the fundamental architecture, and predicted, correctly, the field of AI. We’ve been loosening the straps, widening the von Neumann bottleneck, ever since. Doug Hofstadter has pioneered the systematic introspection of the other end of the spectrum of mental activities, in a way that could not be done by anyone who lacked his deep understanding of the computational possibilities inherent in Turing’s fabulous machine. It is not just that while others have concentrated on problem solving and Scientific Thinking, he has concentrated on daydreaming and Artistic Thinking. He has recognized that even Scientific Thinking is, at its base, analogical. All cognition is analogical. That is where we all must start, with the kid stuff. ()(05 aug 2010)
So just what have Hofstadter and the Fargonauts discovered? Hofstadter lists eight themes that have been explored and re-explored in the succession of models, and I cannot improve on his list:
perception and high-level cognition are inseparable;
high-level perception consists of easily reconfigurable multilevel cognitive representations;
there are “subcognitive pressures” that probabilistically influence the building and reforming of these representations;
many such pressures commingle, “leading to a nondeterministic parallel architecture in which bottom-up and top-down processing coexist gracefully”;
there is a “simultaneous feeling-out of many potential pathways”;
making analogies is a central component in high-level cognition;
cognitive representations have “deeper and shallower aspects, with the former remaining relatively immune to contextual pressures, and the latter being more likely to yield under pressure (to ‘slip’)”;
a crucial role is played by “the inner structure of concepts and conceptual neighborhoods.” (pp. 84–85)
“Luckily,” he goes on to inform us, “having always been fascinated by how the mind works, I have tended to keep careful records of my discovery processes—even back at age sixteen, which is when this particular exploration and discovery took place.” Later in the book, he tells of his alphabetic font obsession:
What ensued was a lengthy period of time during which I designed hundreds of new alphabetic styles, relentlessly exploring all sorts of combinations of gracefulness, funkiness, sassiness, sauciness, silliness, softness, pointiness, hollowness, curviness, jaggedness, roundness, smoothness, complexity, austerity, irregularity, angularity, symmetry, asymmetry, minimality, redundancy, ornamentation, and countless other indefinable parameters. … I am sure that to somebody who hadn’t thought much about alphabets and visual styles and the idea of pushing concepts to their very limits or just beyond, many of my experiments would have looked mysterious and pointless, perhaps even gawky and stupid. But that wouldn’t have deterred me, because I had a stable inner compass that was carrying me somewhere, though I couldn’t have said exactly where or why. As the years [!] went by … (p. 402)
In 1979, Douglas Hofstadter published Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, a brilliant exploration of some of the most difficult and fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: recursion, computation, reduction, holism, meaning, “jootsing” (Jumping Out Of The System), “strange loops,” and much, much more. What made the book’s expositions so effective were a family of elaborate (and lovingly elaborated) analogies: the mind is like an anthill, a formal system is like a game, theorem and nontheorem are like figure and ground, and Bach’s Inventions are like dialogues, to mention a few. The whole analogy-package was wrapped in layers of self-conscious reflection. “Anything you can do I can do meta-” was one of Doug’s mottoes, and of course he applied it, recursively, to everything he did.
Hofstadter’s initial phenomenological observations are laced with questions and suggestions about dynamics and mechanisms; he watches his own mind work the way a stage magician watches another stage magician’s show, not in slack-jawed awe at the “magic” of it all, but full of intense and informed curiosity about how on earth the effects might be achieved. ()(05 aug 2010)
What Douglas Hofstadter is, quite simply, is a phenomenologist, a practicing phenomenologist, and he does it better than anybody else. Ever. For years he has been studying the processes of his own consciousness, relentlessly, unflinchingly, imaginatively, but undeludedly. ()(05 aug 2010)
J. A. Lincoln, writing in the November, 1966, Worm Runner's Digest, had this to say about the composition of such comparatively short palindromes:
It takes two to make a game of chess, the other being of course the Adversary. Black may well resolve beforehand to play the Caro-Kahn or King's Indian, on which he is an expert, but soon, with a scattering of White pawns, a knight and a bishop at his elbow, he finds himself, willy-nilly, embroiled in the complexities of the Three Sailors' Gambit.
The palindromist is in a similar case, for here too the Devil takes a hand. As many impish malignities wad out the pages of the dictionary as ever diabolised within Bill Snyth's crystal. In vain the palindromist may decide that his next effort shall be a perfectly constructed sentence, containing nothing but what is apt; for every word he uses must also be used in reverse, and it is here that irrelevancies creep in. In real life a cigar is not necessarily tragic, nor do dairymen arrive in myriads. In Palindromia, however—
So, there are genuine new techniques here, for the poet to
use, and also genuine areas of knowledge to be explored. One such area
is that which lies between what car ordinarily be said, in normal
correct English, through what, by extension of saying, might be
poetically said, before the boundary is reached of complete gibberish.
Another is the exploration of different poetic logics, using ‘logic’
here in an extended but still definite sense. And the “achievement to
be conquered par excellence is the use of all this new knowledge,
when we have it, and of all these new extended typewriter techniques
(when we have developed them more fully) to enhance and give more power
and variety to the intuitive creativity of the real live poet; not to
replace him. For new techniques, once they become understood, can make
possible the creation of startling new beauty. How, for instance, in
music, can you have a ground bass continue, if the only musical
instruments known to your culture are a conch, a drum and a flute? (haiku.html)(05 aug 2010)
using the computer to augment human thought… this is the stuff we should be using these things for, but the software just isn't there yet:
Not only has it been shown by Huizinga, in his book Homo Ludens, that play is a fundamental religious activity; but also playing with any new technique is the first stage of handling the said technique seriously, of really exploiting it. Here, we have got genuine art creating new techniques? which will emerge as soon as more business executives who have on-line consoles in their offices, find it more fun to write poems on them than to explore the current state of the market, or to model their own firm's production flow. The computer can process more words, faster, than can any human being; it can multi-classify to an extent far beyond the ultimate limit of classification which man can contemplate: it can file-handle, mechanically generating any new file out of any old one with no constraint (e.g. it can turn all the men mentioned in a newspaper report into women, or turn an apologetic business letter into an abusive one, etc.). A moment's reflection should suffice to convince of the immensity of this power. Likewise, it can produce degrees and categories of randomness: and the philosophic re-examination of the whole notion of randomness has been one of the intellectual advances which have occurred partly as side-effects from the intensive study of mechanized calculation. But of all these techniques, the one which is most immediately relevant to compute poetry making, is that of man-machine interaction by means of a reactive online console connected to large rapid-access computer memory. For this enables the computer to enhance and extend the live poet's creativity; not to replace it as would batch-programming a poem on a computer. Larger vocabularies and unusual connexions between the words in them, together with intricate devices hitherto unexplored forms of word-combination, all these can be inserted into the machine, and still leave the live poet, operating the console, free to choose when, how and whether they should be employed: for the machine is being used here as an extension of a typewriter, not as an extension of a desk-calculator.
The same goes for poetry. To put a set of words on disc in the machine,
program the machine to make a random choice between them, constrained
only by rhyming requirements, and to do nothing else, this is to write
idiot poetry. Judged by this test (the test being how much insight was
used in making them), the poems produced by computers are, on the
whole, at present very inferior to computer-produced graphics where
sophisticated mathematical formulae are mechanically converted to
produce abstract topological designs, some of these being of deep
metaphysical beauty.
In poetry, we have not as yet got the generating formulae;
though who would doubt that a poem, any poem, has in fact an interior
logic of its own? The analytic attack made upon the Japanese haiku,
therefore, in order to computerize it, represents a first attempt to
get the glimmer of a glimmer of what the interior logic of a simple
poem-form could be like. (haiku.html)(05 aug 2010)
on the hofstadterian mood, or, an itch to explore
his writing is littered with little anecdotes about sets of afternoons here and there where he dives into some intellectual adventure: translating a Stanislaw Lem story from Polish to English, pointing camcorders at televisions to investigate recursion, training himself to speak backwards (he calls it "Hsilgne"), etc. Feynman has lots of these too: discovering how ants move and manipulating their paths with little paper teleporters, seeing if he could count and think (in various different ways) simultaneously, experimenting with radios, etc.
when I think of how little I have to write about these days—I've been sitting down at the computer feeling like I have an empty mind—I can now see that it's because I've forgotten how to explore. Hofstadterian mental play gets those creative gears spinning up in no time; adventure begets adventure; it won't be long after you start your active wandering that you've got millions of interesting stories. Indeed, you can tell with Hofstadter's books that ideas and analogies and variations were just spilling out of him; he talks about needing all sorts of formal constraints just to get things organized.
so that's what I need more of, these little spurts of creative inspection—afternoons where I feel like I'm "making a study" of something, like I’m going down a rabbit hole. Examples: /blog/directions, dr. seuss, wikipedia, etc.(04 aug 2010)
feculent: of or containing dirt, sediment, or waste matter(04 aug 2010)
lost in translation.
here's one review:
A magnificent picture because it specifically goes out of its way to avoid the clichés and elements would usually expect to see when watching this kind of boy meets girl movie.
yes, yes, exactly, but once you've excised all those clichés you must go farther — you must develop interesting characters and tell a great story.
did LiT do this? yup. we just have to be careful to focus on that, and not pay so much attention to our expectations.(03 aug 2010)
You have a lot of lines in this one that get tons of laughs I doubt were on the page. It’s all
in the rhythm, the delivery. How do you pitch something like that? How do you make something out of nothing?
I have developed a kind of different style over the years. I hate trying to re-create a tone or a pitch. Saying, “I want to make it sound like I made it sound the last time”? That’s insane, because the last time doesn’t exist. It’s only this time. And everything is going to be different this time. There’s only now. And I don’t think a director, as often as not, knows what is going to play funny anyway. As often as not, the right one is the one that they’re surprised by, so I don’t think that they have the right tone in their head. And I think that good actors always—or if you’re being good, anyway—you’re making it better than the script. That’s your fucking job. It’s like, Okay, the script says this? Well, watch this. Let’s just roar a little bit. Let’s see how high we can go.
But you asked how you get the comic pitch. Well, obviously a lot of it is rhythm. And as often as not, it’s the surprising rhythm. In life and in movies, you can usually guess what someone is going to say—you can actually hear it—before they say it. But if you undercut that just a little, it can make you fall off your chair. It’s small and simple like that. You’re always trying to get your distractions out of the way and be as calm as you can be [breathes in and out slowly], and emotion will just drive the machine. It will go through the machine without being interrupted, and it comes out in a rhythm that’s naturally funny. And that funny rhythm is either humorous or touching. It can be either one. But it’s always a surprise. I really don’t know what’s going to come out of my mouth.
Position as plaintiff or defendant. In evaluating procedural rules, we might want to ask, “What rules would be chosen by the parties if they didn’t know whether they were the plaintiff or the defendant?
In To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay says goodnight to her children, and carefully closes the bedroom door, and lets "the tongue of the door slowly lengthen in the lock." The metaphor in that sentence lies not so much in "tongue," which is fairly conventional (since people do talk about locks having tongues) but is secretly buried in the verb, "lengthen." That verb lengthens the whole procedure: Isn't this the best description you have ever read of someone very sl-o-w-ly turning a handle of a door so as not to waken children?(02 aug 2010)
‘All right. Once more, slowly. That literally killing instead of merely running is the killer’s psychotically literal way of resolving the conflict between his need for connection and his terror of being in any way connected. Especially, yes, to a woman, connecting with a woman, whom the vast majority of sexual psychotics do hate and fear, often due to twisted relations with the mother as a child. The psychotic sex killer is thus often quote symbolically killing the mother, whom he hates and fears but of course cannot literally kill because he is still enmeshed in the infantile belief that without her love he will somehow die. The psychotic’s relation to her is one of both terrified hatred and terror and desperate pining need. He finds this conflict unendurable and must thus symbolically resolve it through psychotic sex crimes.’ (02 aug 2010)
And that an all too obvious part of the reason for his cold and mercenary and maybe somewhat victimizing behavior is that the potential profundity of the very connection he has worked so hard to make her feel terrifies him.(02 aug 2010)
Nor is this of course all that substantively different from a man sizing up an attractive girl and approaching her and artfully deploying just the right rhetoric and pushing the right buttons to induce her to come home with him, never once saying anything or touching her in any way that isn’t completely gentle and pleasurable and seemingly respectful, leading her gently and respectfully to his satin-sheeted bed and in the light of the moon making exquisitely attentive love to her and making her come over and over until she’s quote begging for mercy and is totally under his emotional control and feels that she and he must be deeply and unseverably connected for the evening to have been this perfect and mutually respectful and fulfilling and then lighting her cigarettes and engaging in an hour or two of pseudo-intimate post-coital chitchat in his wrecked bed and seeming very close and content when what he really wants is to be in some absolutely antipodal spot from wherever she is from now on and is thinking about how to give her a special disconnected telephone number and never contacting her again.(02 aug 2010)
That her objective is to focus very intently on the psychotic mulatto as an ensouled and beautiful albeit tormented person in his own right instead of merely as a threat to her or a force of evil or the incarnation of her personal death.(02 aug 2010)
Nor would I even begin to try to describe what she looks like as she’s telling the story, reliving it, she’s naked, hair spilling all down her back, sitting meditatively cross-legged amid the wrecked bedding and smoking ultralight Merits from which she keeps removing the filters because she claims they’re full of additives and unsafe — unsafe as she’s sitting there chain-smoking, which was so patently irrational that I couldn’t even bring — yes and some kind of blister on her Achilles tendon, from the sandals, leaning with her upper body to follow the oscillation of the fan so she’s moving in and out of a wash of moon from the window whose angle of incidence itself alters as the moon moves up and across the window — all I can tell you is she was lovely. The bottoms of her feet dirty, almost black. The moon so full it looks engorged. And long hair spilling all over, more than — beautiful lustrous hair that makes you understand why women use conditioner(02 aug 2010)
and then, when one thing had been led stolidly by me to another and there she was in my apartment and we had done what I had wanted to do with her and had exchanged the standard horizontal compliments and assurances(02 aug 2010)
The fact is that she had a body that my body found sexually attractive and wanted to have intercourse with and it was not really any more noble or complicated than that.(02 aug 2010)
There is nothing particularly wrong with this, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings.(02 aug 2010)
Not to mention — to render your own indignation and distaste complete, I’m sure — that extremely, off-the-charts pretty women of almost every type have, from my experience, tend all to have a uniform obsession with this idea of respect, and will do almost anything anywhere for any fellow who affords her a sufficient sense of being deeply and profoundly respected.(02 aug 2010)
Yes and that prior experience has taught that the female Granola Cruncher tends to define herself in opposition to what she sees as the un-considered and hypocrisy-bound attitudes of quote bourgeois women and is thus essentially unoffendable, rejects the whole concept of propriety and offense, views so-called honesty of even the most brutal or repellent sort as evidence of sincerity and respect, getting quote real, the impression that you respect her personhood too much to ply her with implausible fictions and leave very basic natural energies and desires un-communicated.(02 aug 2010)
Note the rhetorically specific blend of childish diction like Hi and fib with flaccid abstractions like nurture and energy and serene. This is the lingua franca of the Inward Bound. I actually truly did like her, I found, as an individual — she had an amused expression during the whole conversation that made it hard not to smile in return, and an involuntary need to smile is one of the best feelings available, no?(02 aug 2010)
Do they not teach Defense against the Dark Arts at university these days? “We can incorporate that new feature, boss. What feature do you want me to cut? I can get you expiring coupons but the store locator will have to go. Your call, you get paid the big money to make the important decisions.” (Hacker News | Is Good Code Impossible?)(01 aug 2010)
Many defended psychiatry, arguing that as psychiatric diagnosis relies largely on the patient’s report of their experiences, faking their presence no more demonstrates problems with psychiatric diagnosis than lying about other medical symptoms. In this vein psychiatrist Robert Spitzer quoted Kety in a 1975 criticism of Rosenhan’s study:
If I were to drink a quart of blood and, concealing what I had done, come to the emergency room of any hospital vomiting blood, the behavior of the staff would be quite predictable. If they labeled and treated me as having a bleeding peptic ulcer, I doubt that I could argue convincingly that medical science does not know how to diagnose that condition.[4]
Whether the emergency room staff would change its diagnosis pending the lack of peptic ulcer symptoms of any kind, however, is another matter. And it was precisely this tendency to cling to a diagnosis — and interpreting all subsequent evidence in order to fit it — that lay at the heart of Rosenhan’s criticism of psychiatric diagnosis. A peptic ulcer would be an appropriate initial hypothesis, but one that could readily be shown to be incorrect. If a hypothesis of schizophrenia could be maintained despite prolonged exposure to the apparent sanity of the patient then, under Rosenhan’s reading, the diagnosis would be essentially meaningless
The Rosenhan experiment was a famous experiment into the validity of psychiatricdiagnosis conducted by psychologistDavid Rosenhan in 1973. It was published in the journal Science under the title “On being sane in insane places.”[1] The study is considered an important and influential criticism of psychiatric diagnosis.[2]
Rosenhan’s study was done in two parts. The first part involved the use of healthy associates or “pseudopatients” who briefly simulated auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 different psychiatric hospitals in five different states in various locations in the United States. All were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. After admission, the pseudopatients acted normally and told staff that they felt fine and had not experienced any more hallucinations. Hospital staff failed to detect a single pseudopatient, and instead believed that all of the pseudopatients exhibited symptoms of ongoing mental illness. Several were confined for months. All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and agree to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release.
The second part involved asking staff at a psychiatric hospital to detect non-existent “fake” patients. The staff falsely identified large numbers of ordinary patients as impostors.
The study concluded, “It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals” and also illustrated the dangers of depersonalization and labeling in psychiatric institutions. It suggested that the use of community mental health facilities which concentrated on specific problems and behaviors rather than psychiatric labels might be a solution and recommended education to make psychiatric workers more aware of the social psychology of their facilities.
haidt's elephant rider: virtue ethics is about training the elephant, i.e., cultivating a keen sense of other people's wants as a way to develop kindness, etc., where deontology and utilitarianism are about training the rider, i.e., instructing him how to calculate and reason(31 jul 2010)
confusing "humean" (a la David Hume) and "human"(31 jul 2010)
Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Much evidence, however, shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests rethinking the function of reasoning. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given human exceptional dependence on communication and vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology or reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively with the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow the persistence of erroneous beliefs. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all of these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and favor conclusions in support of which arguments can be found.(31 jul 2010)
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re‐organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.
Familiarly, the key to Montaigne is his scepticism. It is the scepticism of Pyrrho, as recorded by Sextus Empiricus, which teaches that because the arguments for and against any proposition are equally good or bad, one must suspend judgement (a state known as acatalepsia). This open-minded, non-committal, often ambiguous stance suited Montaigne. He accordingly chose as his motto Que sais-je? (A man for all seasons – Prospect Magazine «Prospect Magazine)(30 jul 2010)
The two vowel clouds show considerable overlap throughout their entire ranges.(30 jul 2010)
Broadly speaking, I think that there are three families of arguments that can be made in defense of markets. Most commonly within the legal academy markets are defended on the basis of efficiency. The central question is distributive: How do we move resources to agents in such a way as to maximize the aggregate welfare? Markets, so the argument, do this very well. Expressed preferences are the coin of the realm in market transactions, and we assume that expressed preferences are the best guide to welfare. Indeed, on some theories welfare simply IS the satisfaction of expressed preferences. Provided that we can have a regime that insures that transactions are voluntary, externalities are internalized, and transaction costs are overcome, markets will allocated resources better than any competing social institution. Thus the efficiency argument.
The second defense of markets is libertarian. This looks a lot of like the efficiency argument but is actually quite different, notwithstanding the fact that libertarians frequently confuse the two. In the libertarian argument what matters is not welfare but freedom. Freedom is taken as a good in and of itself, even if choices might result in reductions of welfare for the chooser. Paternalism is bad because is shows a disrespect for the autonomy of market participants. Depending on how one conceptualizes welfare the libertarian and efficiency arguments very nearly merge with one another. If welfare simply IS the satisfaction of expressed preferences then choice and welfare are very nearly synonymous. Notice, however, that there is nothing about the structure of the libertarian position that requires that one take such a position on the meaning of welfare. One might acknowledge the reality of welfare-reducing choices, while prioritizing choice over welfare normatively. Notice that in this argument there is nothing special about markets. They are simply a locus of choice, but so are many other institutions and practices from love affairs to soccer clubs. Thus the libertarian argument.(30 jul 2010)
how much data do you have to have before it becomes economical to ship it physically rather than transmit it over cables?(30 jul 2010)
the effect a dream can have on how you consciously perceive a person(30 jul 2010)
switching keyboard layouts to type passwords(29 jul 2010)
“History” describes the view that large-scale historical and transformative forces in American politics account for the modern structure, coherence, and polarization of the Democratic and Republican parties of today. The specific historical processes involve the end of the 20th Century one-party monopoly on the American South, which began with the 1965 enactment of the Voting Rights Act; the destruction of that world eventually led, by the 1990s, to the South having a system of genuine two-party competition for the first time since the Civil War. How much does the dramatic re-organization of American democracy entailed by that transformation account for the structure of partisan conflict today? “Institutions” refers to more discrete structures that organize democracy: the structure of primary elections, gerrymandering, campaign finance, and the internal rules that allocate power to political leaders in the House and Senate today. How much do these specific institutional features contribute to polarization, and in what ways, if any might they be changed to diminish it?
To foreshadow, the article concludes that the major cause of the extreme polarization of our era is the historical transformation of American democracy and America’s political parties set into motion by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Thus, perhaps the extreme polarization over the last generation should not be seen as aberrational (indeed, the pre-1965 structure of parties is the one to view as aberrational). This polarization, for better or worse, might be the “mature” structure of American democracy. As such, it is likely to be enduring, despite the best efforts of Presidents and reformers to transcend the extreme polarization of recent years.(29 jul 2010)
QVC’s target was thirty-seven thousand machines, meaning that it hoped to gross about $4.5 million during the twenty-four hours—a huge day, even by the network’s standards. (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
If Ron had been the one to introduce the VCR, in other words, he would not simply have sold it in an infomercial. He would also have changed the VCR itself, so that it made sense in an infomercial. The clock, for example, wouldn’t be digital. (The haplessly blinking unset clock has, of course, become a symbol of frustration.) The tape wouldn’t be inserted behind a hidden door—it would be out in plain view, just like the chicken in the rotisserie, so that if it was recording you could see the spools turn. The controls wouldn’t be discreet buttons; they would be large, and they would make a reassuring click as they were pushed up and down, and each step of the taping process would be identified with a big, obvious numeral so that you could set it and forget it. And would it be a slender black, low-profile box? Of course not. Ours is a culture in which the term “black box” is synonymous with incomprehensibility. Ron’s VCR would be in red-and-white plastic, both opaque and translucent swirl, or maybe 364 Alcoa aluminum, painted in some bold primary color, and it would sit on top of the television, not below it, so that when your neighbor or your friend came over he would spot it immediately and say, “Wow, you have one of those Ronco Tape-O-Matics!” (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
Why does this work so well? Because the Showtime—like the Veg-O-Matic before it—was designed to be the star. From the very beginning, Ron insisted that the entire door be a clear pane of glass, and that it slant back to let in the maximum amount of light, so that the chicken or the turkey or the baby-back ribs turning inside would be visible at all times. Alan Backus says that after the first version of the Showtime came out Ron began obsessing over the quality and evenness of the browning and became convinced that the rotation speed of the spit wasn’t quite right. The original machine moved at four revolutions per minute. Ron set up a comparison test in his kitchen, cooking chicken after chicken at varying speeds until he determined that the optimal speed of rotation was actually six r.p.m. One can imagine a bright-eyed M.B.A. clutching a sheaf of focus-group reports and arguing that Ronco was really selling convenience and healthful living, and that it was foolish to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars retooling production in search of a more even golden brown. But Ron understood that the perfect brown is important for the same reason that the slanted glass door is important: because in every respect the design of the product must support the transparency and effectiveness of its performance during a demonstration—the better it looks onstage, the easier it is for the pitchman to go into the turn and ask for the money. (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
e-week run of the cheapest airtime they could find, praying that it would be enough to drive traffic to the store. “We got Veg-O-Matics wholesale for $3.42,” Korey says. “They retailed for $9.95, and we sold them to the stores for $7.46, which meant that we had four dollars to play with. If I spent a hundred dollars on television, I had to sell twenty-five Veg-O-Matics to break even.” It was clear, in those days, that you could use television to sell kitchen products if you were Procter & Gamble. It wasn’t so clear that this would work if you were Mel Korey and Ron Popeil, two pitchmen barely out of their teens selling a combination slicer-dicer that no one had ever heard of. They were taking a wild gamble, and, to their amazement, it paid off. “They had a store in Butte, Montana—Hennessy’s,” Korey goes on, thinking back to those first improbable years. “Back then, people there were still wearing peacoats. The city was mostly bars. It had just a few three-story buildings. There were twenty-seven thousand people, and one TV station. I had the Veg-O-Matic, and I go to the store, and they said, ‘We’ll take a case. We don’t have a lot of traffic here.’ I go to the TV station and the place is a dump. The only salesperson was going blind and deaf. So I do a schedule. For five weeks, I spend three hundred and fifty dollars. I figure if I sell a hundred and seventy-four machines—six cases—I’m happy. I go back to Chicago, and I walk into the office one morning and the phone is ringing. They said, ‘We sold out. You’ve got to fly us another six cases of Veg-O-Matics.’ The next week, on Monday, the phone rings. It’s Butte again: ‘We’ve got a hundred and fifty oversold.’ I fly him another six cases. Every few days after that, whenever the phone rang we’d look at each other and say, ‘Butte, Montana.’ ” Even today, thirty years later, Korey can scarcely believe it. “How many homes in total in that town? Maybe several thousand? We ended up selling two thousand five hundred Veg-O-Matics in five weeks!” (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
In a single minute, according to the calculations of Popeil Brothers, it could produce a hundred and twenty egg wedges, three hundred cucumber slices, eleven hundred and fifty potato shoestrings, or three thousand onion dices. It could go through what used to be a day’s worth of vegetables in a matter of minutes. The pitchman could no longer afford to pitch to just a hundred people at a time; he had to pitch to a hundred thousand. The Veg-O-Matic needed to be sold on television, and one of the very first pitchmen to grasp this fact was Ron Popeil. (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
“Wow,” I said. Ron glowed. “And you tell me Wow.' That's what everyone says.Wow.’ That’s what people say who use it. `Wow.’ If you go outside”—he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out onto the deck—“if you are in bright sunlight or daylight, you cannot tell that I have a big bald spot in the back of my head. It really looks like hair, but it’s not hair. It’s quite a product. It’s incredible. Any shampoo will take it out. You know who would be a great candidate for this? Al Gore. You want to see how it feels?” Ron inclined the back of his head toward me. I had said, “Wow,” and had looked at his hair inside and outside, but the pitchman in Ron Popeil wasn’t satisfied. I had to feel the back of his head. I did. It felt just like real hair. (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
Thirty years ago, the videocassette recorder came on the market, and it was a disruptive product, too: it was supposed to make it possible to tape a television show so that no one would ever again be chained to the prime-time schedule. Yet, as ubiquitous as the VCR became, it was seldom put to that purpose. That’s because the VCR was never pitched: no one ever explained the gadget to American consumers—not once or twice but three or four times—and no one showed them exactly how it worked or how it would fit into their routine, and no pair of hands guided them through every step of the process. All the VCR-makers did was hand over the box with a smile and a pat on the back, tossing in an instruction manual for good measure. Any pitchman could have told you that wasn’t going to do it. (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
When Michael Jordan pitches McDonald’s hamburgers, Michael Jordan is the star. But when Ron Popeil or Arnold Morris pitched, say, the Chop-O-Matic, his gift was to make the Chop-O-Matic the star. It was, after all, an innovation. It represented a different way of dicing onions and chopping liver: it required consumers to rethink the way they went about their business in the kitchen. Like most great innovations, it was disruptive. And how do you persuade people to disrupt their lives? Not merely by ingratiation or sincerity, and not by being famous or beautiful. You have to explain the invention to customers— not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and, finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use. (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
Arnold says that he once hired some guys to pitch a vegetable slicer for him at a fair in Danbury, Connecticut, and became so annoyed at their lackadaisical attitude that he took over the demonstration himself. They were, he says, waiting for him to fail: he had never worked that particular slicer before and, sure enough, he was massacring the vegetables. Still, in a single pitch he took in two hundred dollars. “Their eyes popped out of their heads,” Arnold recalls. “They said, We don't understand it. You don't even know how to work the damn machine.' I said,But I know how to do one thing better than you.’ They said, What's that?' I said,I know how to ask for the money.’ And that’s the secret to the whole damn business.” (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
He must be able to execute what in pitchman’s parlance is called “the turn”—the perilous, crucial moment where he goes from entertainer to businessman. If, out of a crowd of fifty, twenty-five people come forward to buy, the true pitchman sells to only twenty of them. To the remaining five, he says, “Wait! There’s something else I want to show you!” Then he starts his pitch again, with slight variations, and the remaining four or five become the inner core of the next crowd, hemmed in by the people around them, and so eager to pay their money and be on their way that they start the selling frenzy all over again. The turn requires the management of expectation. (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
“Take a look at this!” He held it in the air as if he were holding up a Tiffany vase. He talked about the machine’s prowess at cutting potatoes, then onions, then tomatoes. His voice, a marvellous instrument inflected with the rhythms of the Jersey Shore, took on a singsong quality: “How many cut tomatoes like this? You stab it. You jab it. The juices run down your elbow. With the Dial-O-Matic, you do it a little differently. You put it in the machine and you wiggle”—he mimed fixing the tomato to the bed of the machine. “The tomato! Lady! The tomato! The more you wiggle, the more you get. The tomato! Lady! Every slice comes out perfectly, not a seed out of place. But the thing I love my Dial-O-Matic for is coleslaw. My mother-in-law used to take her cabbage and do this.” He made a series of wild stabs at an imaginary cabbage. “I thought she was going to commit suicide. Oh, boy, did I pray—that she wouldn’t slip! Don’t get me wrong. I love my mother-in-law. It’s her daughter I can’t figure out. You take the cabbage. Cut it in half. Coleslaw, hot slaw. Pot slaw. Liberty slaw. It comes out like shredded wheat …” (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
He is in his early seventies, a cheerful, impish man with a round face and a few wisps of white hair, and a trademark move whereby, after cutting a tomato into neat, regular slices, he deftly lines the pieces up in an even row against the flat edge of the blade. (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
It’s said that Nathan’s nephew Archie (the Pitchman’s Pitchman) Morris once sold, over a long afternoon, gadget after gadget to a well-dressed man. At the end of the day, Archie watched the man walk away, stop and peer into his bag, and then dump the whole lot into a nearby garbage can. The Morrises were that good. “My cousins could sell you an empty box,” Ron says. (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
It was then that Ron filmed a television infomercial for the Showtime, twenty-eight minutes and thirty seconds in length. It was shot live before a studio audience, and aired for the first time on August 8, 1998. It has run ever since, often in the wee hours of the morning, or on obscure cable stations, alongside the get-rich schemes and the “Three’s Company” reruns. The response to it has been such that within the next three years total sales of the Showtime should exceed a billion dollars. Ron Popeil didn’t use a single focus group. He had no market researchers, R. & D. teams, public-relations advisers, Madison Avenue advertising companies, or business consultants. He did what the Morrises and the Popeils had been doing for most of the century, and what all the experts said couldn’t be done in the modern economy. He dreamed up something new in his kitchen and went out and pitched it himself. (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
And the spit rod had to rotate on the horizontal axis, not the vertical axis, because if you cooked a chicken or a side of beef on the vertical axis the top would dry out and the juices would drain to the bottom. Roderick Dorman, Ron’s patent attorney, says that when he went over to Coldwater Canyon he often saw five or six prototypes on the kitchen counter, lined up in a row. Ron would have a chicken in each of them, so that he could compare the consistency of the flesh and the browning of the skin, and wonder if, say, there was a way to rotate a shish kebab as it approached the heating element so that the inner side of the kebab would get as brown as the outer part. By the time Ron finished, the Showtime prompted no fewer than two dozen patent applications. It was equipped with the most powerful motor in its class. It had a drip tray coated with a nonstick ceramic, which was easily cleaned, and the oven would still work even after it had been dropped on a concrete or stone surface ten times in succession, from a distance of three feet. To Ron, there was no question that it made the best chicken he had ever had in his life. (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
Together, they bought a glass aquarium, a motor, a heating element, a spit rod, and a handful of other spare parts, and began tinkering. (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
The other project, his inspiration, was a device capable of smoking meats indoors without creating odors that can suffuse the air and permeate furniture. Ron had a version of the indoor smoker on his porch—“a Rube Goldberg kind of thing” that he’d worked on a year earlier—and, on a whim, he cooked a chicken in it. “That chicken was so good that I said to myself”—and with his left hand Ron began to pound on the table—“This is the best chicken sandwich I have ever had in my life.” He turned to me: “How many times have you had a smoked-turkey sandwich? Maybe you have a smoked- turkey or a smoked-chicken sandwich once every six months. Once! How many times have you had smoked salmon? Aah. More. I’m going to say you come across smoked salmon as an hors d’oeuvre or an entrée once every three months. Baby-back ribs? Depends on which restaurant you order ribs at. Smoked sausage, same thing. You touch on smoked food”—he leaned in and poked my arm for emphasis—“but I know one thing, Malcolm. You don’t have a smoker.” (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
And Ron Popeil was the most brilliant and spirited of them all. He was the family’s Joseph, exiled to the wilderness by his father only to come back and make more money than the rest of the family combined. He was a pioneer in taking the secrets of the boardwalk pitchmen to the television screen. And, of all the kitchen gadgets in the Morris-Popeil pantheon, nothing has ever been quite so ingenious in its design, or so broad in its appeal, or so perfectly representative of the Morris-Popeil belief in the interrelation of the pitch and the object being pitched, as the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ, the countertop oven that can be bought for four payments of $39.95 and may be, dollar for dollar, the finest kitchen appliance ever made. (gladwell dot com - the pitchman)(29 jul 2010)
the brain consumes less power than a lightbulb(28 jul 2010)
An important benefit of knowing the eigenvectors and values of a system is that the effects of the action of the matrix on the system can be predicted. Each application of the matrix to an arbitrary vector yields a result which will have rotated towards the eigenvector with the largest eigenvalue. [1](28 jul 2010)
And no, the currently popular “pave the cowpaths” and behavioral-economic “choice architecture” design philosophies do not provide immunity against these failure modes. In fact paving the cowpaths in naive ways is an instance of this failure mode (the way to avoid it would be to choose to not pave certain cowpaths). Choice architecture (described as “Libertarian Paternalism” by its advocates) seems to merely dress up authoritarian high-modernism with a thin coat of caution and empirical experimentation. The basic and dangerous “I am more scientific/rational than thou” paternalism is still the central dogma(27 jul 2010)
Central to Scott’s thesis is the idea of legibility. He explains how he stumbled across the idea while researching efforts by nation states to settle or “sedentarize” nomads, pastoralists, gypsies and other peoples living non-mainstream lives:
The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The pre-modern state was, in many crucial respects, particularly blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people.(27 jul 2010)
The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure
Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high modernism,” but as we’ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of high modernism (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).
Here is the recipe:
Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly
The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility.(27 jul 2010)
Formalists may be claiming that when judges use the term “holding” they are, in fact, referring to the ratio decidendi of a case. Realits may be claiming that when judges use the word “holding” they are, in fact, making a prediction about what the court will do in the future.(27 jul 2010)
Legal realists have a very different theory of what constitutes a holding. Here is one way of getting at it. Legal realists view holdings as predictions of what future courts will do. The holding of a case is simply the best prediction that we can extract from the opinion as to what rule the court would apply in future cases.(27 jul 2010)
lawyers as the only people who know all the rules of the country, who have read the inside of the box(27 jul 2010)
The results were not always great. I don’t remember the very first class I taught, but sometime in September, I led a seventh grade class in front of the other seventh grade teacher. Disaster. When he asked me to reflect afterwards on what had happened, I started babbling on about something at which point he interjected and correctly observed that my problems had begun much sooner than whatever it was I was babbling on about: from the second the bell rang I didn’t have control of the class. This was the single most important lesson I learned. It seems obvious, but, if the students aren’t listening, then they can’t hear your directions so they’re not going to follow them.(26 jul 2010)
I already knew I liked Japan since I’d come before in college, but in terms of teaching, I was horribly unprepared. This is a bit of a strange situation to arrive in given that I would be in school for 45 hours a week teaching 19 classes spread out over 13 sections in four grade levels. But there’s no better way to learn than to do, so do I did.(26 jul 2010)
Andy: What qualities make a person a good candidate for copy editing?
Mary: Self-doubt. It’s always good, before changing something, to stop and wonder if this is a mistake or if the writer did this for a reason. When you’ve read a piece five or more times, it is tempting to believe that it must be perfect, but you have to stay alert for anything you might have missed. Eternal vigilance! It also helps to have read widely (and well), and to have noticed, while you’re at it, how words are spelled. Of course you have to be attentive to details—you have to be a bit of a nitpicker yet be constructive in your nit-picking. You have to love language. And not be too proud to run spell-check. (Copy Editing at The New Yorker with Mary Norris «Ask the Agent)(25 jul 2010)
On the other hand, you find fewer quirky pieces that may not be particularly newsworthy but that readers love. For instance, “Uncle Tungsten,” by Oliver Sacks. (I still regret making him spell “sulfur” our way, with the “f,” when he wanted to spell it the old-fashioned British way, “sulphur,” which he’d grown up with.) Ian Frazier’s two-part piece on his travels in Siberia is a good recent example of a beautiful, funny, interesting, old-fashioned piece of writing. A good writer can make you care about anything. (Copy Editing at The New Yorker with Mary Norris «Ask the Agent)(25 jul 2010)
Arno Penzias used to offer two semi-contradictory pieces of advice about communication, both apparently based on his personal experience.
One recommendation was always to document and report everything, because you never know what might be important. He would then tell the story of how what he originally thought was thermal emissions from pigeon waste turned out to be the cosmic microwave background (“It’s not birdshit”, he would exclaim, “it’s the origin of the universe!”), and led to his Nobel prize.
The other piece of advice — typically offered as a comment on presentations indended for AT&T line managers — was that sometimes more information is less convincing. His example was wooing someone by praising their intelligence, grace, and beauty, and then noting how conveniently located their apartment is. This is a somewhat more elaborate version of the xkcd joke, but one which makes no particular demands on a language’s word-order preferences.(24 jul 2010)
If you propitiate someone, you stop them being angry or impatient by doing something to please them.
Verbformal
involute: especially of petals or leaves in bud; having margins rolled inward. "It's worth noting that as so much contemporary poetry, classical music, etc. become ever more abstract and involute and technically complex…"(24 jul 2010)
Before Bolyai’s era, Euclidean geometry was geometry. Euclid’s so-called “parallel postulate”—that every line admits a unique parallel through a given point not on that line—was considered self-evidently true, though no one had been able to derive it logically from Euclid’s other axioms. Bolyai took a different route, asking: what if it’s not true? What if there were a whole spray of lines through the same point, all parallel to the same line? Mathematicians of an earlier era might have found the question incomprehensible; draw a picture on a napkin and you’ll see there just aren’t such lines. But Bolyai was different. He envisioned a geometry having nothing to do with the universe you can sketch on paper. And not only envisioned it—he pinned it to the page, understood its rules and features.
“All I can say now,” he wrote his father in triumph, “is that I have created a new and different world out of nothing.”
A very closely related idea is that most people have a “ground state”: an activity that they naturally gravitate toward when nothing else intervenes.
For many people, their ground state is shopping, or talking with friends, or watching tv. Nothing wrong with any of these.
For some people, their ground state is aimless coding, or writing, or drifting around some community (e.g., the community of actors, or musicians, etc). Again, nothing wrong with any of these, and they may be a useful way of learning, or having ideas.
But for a very small number of people their ground state is much more focused. I’ve known people whose ground state is writing papers about physics or mathematics. And it’s simply unbelievable what such people can get done in a year. (Note, mind you, that very few professional physicists or mathematicians fall into this category.)
I haven’t founded or worked at a startup. My observation-from-the-outside is that founders often have to take on many different tasks. And I wonder how difficult that must make it for any of them to become a ground state task.
“advect” is a great word. Advection, in chemistry and engineering, is a transport mechanism of a substance, or a conserved property, by a fluid, due to the fluid’s bulk motion in a particular direction. An example of advection is the transport of pollutants or silt in a river. The motion of the water carries these impurities downstream. Another commonly advected property is heat, and here the fluid may be water, air, or any other heat-containing fluid material. Any substance, or conserved property (such as heat) can be advected, in a similar way, in any fluid. (Advection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(22 jul 2010)
In two recent books, I have laid out a theory of “generational cycles” that sheds new light on constitutional law.[5] Drawing on the scholarship of Bruce Ackerman, Stephen Skowronek, and Keith Whittington, the theory holds that there is a robust pattern in our politics, which repeats itself approximately every thirty years, in which a new movement rises up against the constitutional abuses of the previous generation of leadership and realigns the electorate.[6] Starting with the Founders’ rebellion against the British in the 1770s, this tale of reform, ossification, and rebirth recurred with Jefferson’s Revolution of 1800, Jacksonian Democracy’s sweep in 1828, Lincoln’s unlikely triumph in 1860, the epic duel between McKinley and Bryan in 1896, Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1932, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.(21 jul 2010)
When I think of all that my mind has done, all that it could do, and all that it contains, and compare that to what it feels like it's doing right now, I can't help but marvel, first, at its awesome latent power, and second, at how little of that power I command at any given moment. I’m like the general of a giant army who keeps being kidnapped by tiny factions of his troops: in principle I might have tremendous mental resources, but in practice I’m constantly held hostage by one clique or another, my cognition limited to a small universe of currently active associations, memories, concepts, words, images, and analogies.(21 jul 2010)
waiting just a little longer after someone says "what?" or "pardon?" or "sorry?" for your words to hit them, since they've almost always heard you(21 jul 2010)
how demanding can a chain letter get before people stop participating?(20 jul 2010)
For whatever reason I was bored by Inception. I liked the concept of nested dreams and the idea that time slows down the deeper you go, and of course I was tickled that the central conflict was a clever take on the old “brain in a vat” problem, but otherwise I felt shortchanged. Every “explanation” amounted to no more than: “you know that funny feeling you get when you dream? Well, [insert the logical extension of that + some bullshit].” It just didn’t strike me as being particularly creative, and at its worst, the idea of trying to “layer” “kicks” was the bad kind of absurd.
I don’t even remember if we found out whether the inception ended up working. But who cares? That whole trite father-son business and the act of inception itself was pretty much incidental to Cobb’s battle against (and for) his wife. Which would be fine if we didn’t have to spend a good hour or so wrapped up in inconsequential nonsense.
Gordon-Levitt did a good job—this could be a very important break for him. But Ellen Page was a total dud in my mind. I like that she tried to break out of her hipster mold, but she pushed the pendulum way too hard in the other direction: she was robotic. Her only apparent purpose was to be a shill for the audience, asking our questions for us: “And so this is your dream? […] Why are people looking at me like that? […] What the hell was that thing with your wife? What aren’t you telling us?” Which is to say that she played a role that could have been played by any other actor (or maybe any cute young girl actor with a boyish voice).
The Matrix was much better, in my mind, because there we’re fundamentally on the same page as Neo: we empathize with him (in the sense of picturing ourselves in his shoes) when everything he knows about the world is replaced with “the truth”—for us, a carefully constructed and very creative fictional universe full of rich detail that sucks us in like any other sprawling speculative fiction (Harry Potter, Anathem, Foundation, LOTR, etc., etc.). We’re given time to learn the rules of this new ‘verse alongside our protagonist—this training and initiation providing some of the best scenes—rather than having awkward explanations thrown at us every time something strange happens. Said another way: where it feels like Inception plops us in the middle of some half-formed idea and fills holes by making shit up as it goes along, we get the impression that the matrix and Morpheus et al. were there long before we, or Neo, arrived on the scene, and once we get there, we’re drawn right down the rabbit hole.
I’ll crib my final point from A. O. Scott’s review: we have high expectations when a guy like Nolan gets his hands on an idea like Inception’s. In particular we expect him to make something really cool out of dreams: the psychology of dreams, the metaphysics of dreams, the mystery of dreams, etc.—it’s a really ripe and deep and interesting topic—but all he ends up doing is saying “dream = time-warped version of the real world with bizarre physics and people from your haunted past”. At no point did I feel as though these characters were in a dream that resembled any dream I’ve ever had, and though the dreamscapes were visually stunning and magnificently filmed, they weren’t all that interesting or surprising or strange.
The whole thing just felt uncreative. What a shame.(20 jul 2010)
The conception of reasonableness that is most familiar to contemporary law students was introduced by Judge Learned Hand in the famous Carroll Towing case.
[T]he owner’s duty, as in other similar situations, to provide against resulting injuries is a function of three variables: (1) The probability that she will break away; (2) the gravity of the resulting injury, if she does; (3) the burden of adequate precautions. Possibly it serves to bring this notion into relief to state it in algebraic terms: if the probability be called P; the injury, L; and the burden, B; liability depends upon whether B is less than L multiplied by P: i.e., whether B less than PL.(20 jul 2010)
Thelee of a place is the shelter that it gives from the wind or bad weather.(19 jul 2010)
loess = a fine-grained unstratified accumulation of clay and silt deposited by the wind(19 jul 2010)
isoclinal - isoclinic line: an isogram connecting points of equal magnetic inclination (or more generally, a line connecting points with the same value of some feature)(19 jul 2010)
Salitter seems only to have occurred, used in this way, in the writings of Jakob Boehme, a 17th century German Christian mystic. Here is enough of what he says about it, to begin to understand the exquisite choice made by McCarthy in using the word:
“What is in Paradise is made of the celestial Salitter..[it] is clear, resplendent..The forces of the celestial Salitter give rise to celestial fruits flowers, and vegetation.” (1.)
Salitter, as used by Boehme, as used by McCarthy, is the essence of God. It is the essence of God which is “drying from the earth” in this apocalyptic novel. It is the end of the Earth for humanity, and also the abandonment of the Earth by what had been divine.
The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. (Salitter «The First Morning)(19 jul 2010)
The essence of the typical slippery slope is this: it establishes a firm “handshake”between the generic and the masculine, in such a way that the feminine term is left out inthe cold. The masculine inherits the abstract power of the generic, and the generic inheritsthe power that comes with specific imagery. Here is an example of the generic-benefitsfrom-speck effect: “Man forging his destiny”. Who can resist thinking of some kind ofhuge mythical brute of a guy hacking his way forward in a jungle or otherwise makingprogress? Does the image of a woman even come close to getting evoked? I seriouslydoubt it. And now for the converse, consider these gems: “Kennedy was a man for allseasons.” “Feynman is the world’s smartest man.” “Only a man with powerful estheticintuition could have created the general theory of relativity.” “Few men have done morefor science than Stephen Hawking.” “Leopold and Loeb wanted to test the idea that aperfect crime might be committed by men of sufficient intelligence.” Why “man” and“men”, here? The answer is: to take advantage of the specific-benefits-from -genericeffect. The power of the word “man” emanates largely from its close connection with themythical “ideal man”: Man the Thinker, Man the Mover, Man whose Best Friend is Dog(19 jul 2010)
If I write, “In the nineteenth century, the kings of nonsense were Edward Lear andLewis Carroll”, people will with no trouble get the message that those two men were thebest of all nonsense writers at that time. But now consider what happens if I write, “Thequeen of twentieth-century nonsense is Gertrude Stein”. The implication is unequivocal:Gertrude Stein is, among female writers of nonsense, the best. It leaves completely openher ranking relative to males. She might be way down the list! Now isn’t thispreposterous? Why is our language so asymmetric? This is hardly chivalry —it is uttercondescension. (Default Words and Images)(19 jul 2010)
In fact, our survival had become a matter of national pride. Our ordeal was being celebrated as a glorious adventure… I didn’t know how to explain to them that there was no glory in those mountains. It was all ugliness and fear and desperation, and the obscenity of watching so many innocent people die. (Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(19 jul 2010)
The survivors of the crash had found a small transistor radio on the plane and Roy Harley first heard the news that the search was cancelled on their eleventh day on the mountain. Piers Paul Read in Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (a text based upon interviews with the survivors) described the moments after this discovery:
The others who had clustered around Roy, upon hearing the news, began to sob and pray, all except Parrado, who looked calmly up the mountains which rose to the west. Gustavo [Coco] Nicolich came out of the plane and, seeing their faces, knew what they had heard… [Nicolich] climbed through the hole in the wall of suitcases and rugby shirts, crouched at the mouth of the dim tunnel, and looked at the mournful faces which were turned towards him. ‘Hey boys,’ he shouted, ‘there’s some good news! We just heard on the radio. They’ve called off the search.’ Inside the crowded plane there was silence. As the hopelessness of their predicament enveloped them, they wept. ‘Why the hell is that good news?’ Paez shouted angrily at Nicolich. ‘Because it means,’ [Nicolich] said, ‘that we’re going to get out of here on our own.’ The courage of this one boy prevented a flood of total despair.[1]
A sortal is something that takes numerical modifiers. There is disagreement about the exact definition of the term as well as whether the term is applied to linguistic things (like predicates or words), abstract entities (like properties), or psychological entities, (such as concepts).
In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker’s dialect. The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original, but plausible in the same context (“old-timers’ disease” for “Alzheimer’s disease”). This is as opposed to a malapropism, where the substitution creates a nonsensical phrase. Classical malapropisms generally derive their comic effect from the fault of the user, while eggcorns are errors that exhibit creativity or logic.[1] Eggcorns often involve replacing an unfamiliar, archaic, or obscure word with a more common or modern word (“baited breath” for “bated breath”).[2] (Eggcorn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(19 jul 2010)
Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked
problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them
as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version
1, then (f) iterating rapidly. (Six Principles for Making New Things)(17 jul 2010)
Freeman embarked on a national campaign in his van which he called his “lobotomobile” to demonstrate the procedure to doctors working at state-run institutions; Freeman would show off by icepicking both of a patient’s eyesockets at one time - one with each hand.[3] According to some, institutional care was hampered by lack of effective treatments and extreme overcrowding, and Freeman saw the transorbital lobotomy as an expedient tool to get large populations out of treatment and back into private life. (Walter Freeman (neurologist) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(17 jul 2010)
Bootleggers and rum runners smuggled Canadian spirits into the U.S. by the metric shitload.(16 jul 2010)
"evite" means to avoid (think "evitable")(16 jul 2010)
Now zoom way the fuck out. Each generation is born into a society seemingly packed with purpose and design: the roads and rules and roles all look natural, like they're meant to be there, just like the corollaries in a well-written proof. But to think of them this way is to forfeit a radical kind of freedom, of a world stripped of all this baggage. That is, if you think of yourself as being on page n of a coherent history, the bulk of which was written by other people before your time, rather than thinking of your forbears as clueless hackers just like you and this moment as your own, you end up signing a contract you didn't write, and assuming a role that's too small, and forgetting that you alone are the master of your world.(16 jul 2010)
“Right. I don’t believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people capable of understanding math, and the rest of the world is normal. Math is a human discovery, and it’s no more complicated than humans can understand. I had a calculus book once that said, ‘What one fool can do, another can.’ What we’ve been able to work out about nature may look abstract and threatening to someone who hasn’t studied it, but it was fools who did it, and in the next generation, all the fools will understand it. There’s a tendency to pomposity in all this, to make it deep and profound.”
— Feynman, Omni 1979 (Feynman Algorithm)(16 jul 2010)
So find a broker that has a FIX api, buy some data for backtesting, code some stuff out using R/python, and forward test your strat using papertrading for about a month— then put real money to work.(15 jul 2010)
Maybe I should be puzzled by my own acceptance of these experiences as providing evidence for moral truths, but I suppose my meta-ethical views re: Gibbard make this not particularly puzzling. Under this view, to say something is morally blameworthy is to say that I adopt a system of norms such that it is appropriate to feel guilt if I do that something, where the adoption of a system of norms is some fairly complex psychological process. Surely these highly emotionally charged experiences of my life are relevant in determining the nature of the system of norms that I have adopted, so it is not far fetched to say that these experiences give me important evidence for moral truths.(15 jul 2010)
I would call myself an atheist before a theist because I think the primary thing that “God” picks out is, as Somin says, an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent being, and I feel fairly sure there is no such thing.
I wouldn’t call myself an atheist because, for example, I believe that experiences of the divine are non-delusional and say something important about who we are as humans and what it is we ought to do, because I believe that prayer is a meaningful activity, and because I see many fruitful lines of thought that trace down through theologians. This would all be consistent with Somin’s definition of atheism, but I don’t believe that definition captures how the term is used in practice. Generally, I think, an “atheist” is someone who thinks religious practitioners are fundamentally misguided and devote large portions of their time to something that is in essence a sham. I don’t share that view.(15 jul 2010)
To distinguish cases where religious objectors win from those in which they lose, the Sherbert–era Court used what it called “strict scrutiny” when the law imposed a “substantial burden” on people’s religious beliefs (e.g., when it banned behavior that the objectors saw as religiously compelled, or mandated behavior that the objectors saw as religiously prohibited): Religious objectors must prevail unless applying the law to them is the least restrictive means of serving a compelling government interest. But while the “strict scrutiny” test in race and free speech cases was generally seen as “strict in theory, fatal in fact” (Gerry Gunther’s phrase), almost always invalidating the government law, in religious freedom cases it was “strict in theory, feeble in fact” (Larry Sager & Chris Eisgruber’s phrase). The government usually won, and religious objectors won only rarely.
Some material things make my life more enjoyable; many, however, would not. I like having an expensive private plane, but owning a half-dozen homes would be a burden. Too often, a vast collection of possessions ends up possessing its owner. The asset I most value, aside from health, is interesting, diverse, and long-standing friends.
My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest. Both my children and I won what I call the ovarian lottery. (For starters, the odds against my 1930 birth taking place in the U.S. were at least 30 to 1. My being male and white also removed huge obstacles that a majority of Americans then faced.)
My luck was accentuated by my living in a market system that sometimes produces distorted results, though overall it serves our country well. I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions. In short, fate’s distribution of long straws is wildly capricious.
The reaction of my family and me to our extraordinary good fortune is not guilt, but rather gratitude. Were we to use more than 1% of my claim checks on ourselves, neither our happiness nor our well-being would be enhanced. In contrast, that remaining 99% can have a huge effect on the health and welfare of others. That reality sets an obvious course for me and my family: Keep all we can conceivably need and distribute the rest to society, for its needs. My pledge starts us down that course.
Less persuasively, however, modern philosophers of tort have spelled out the general claim that tort is a law of wrongs – and their reciprocal, rights – in the more particular thesis that tort is about the rectification of wrongs. Influential legal philosophers have argued, for example, that “tort law is best explained by corrective justice” because “at its core tort law seeks to repair wrongful losses”. Other theorists, marching under the banner of “civil recourse” have argued that the normative essence of tort law lies in the plaintiff’s right to demand redress from the defendant. The claim that remedial responsibilities are the core of tort law ought to give us pause. Calling responsibilities of redress the heart of tort law makes tort a remedial institution, an institution whose raison d’etre is repair. Yet in tort law itself remedial responsibilities to repair wrongful losses arise out of failures to discharge antecedent responsibilities not to inflict wrongful injury in the first instance.
This paper argues that remedialist accounts of tort are right to place the concept of a wrong – and its reciprocal, a right – at the heart of tort law, but wrong to give those concepts an essentially remedial interpretation. Remedial responsibilities in tort are subordinate, not fundamental. They are logically subordinate because they are conditioned on and arise out of antecedent wrongs. These wrongs are not themselves corrective injustices, but failures to respect rights. Remedial responsibilities are normatively subordinate because the reason why tortfeasors are obligated to undo the harms wrought by their torts is that they have failed to discharge their primary responsibilities to avoid committing those torts in the first place. Breaching those responsibilities leaves them undischarged, and precludes full compliance with those responsibilities. Repairing harm wrongly done is a second-best way of discharging an obligation not to do harm wrongly in the first place. (11 jul 2010)
Everyone has their own favorite host naming conventions. Usually it’s something arbitrary, like naming all machines after characters from a TV show.
My convention is to name everything after chemical elements. This is handy for a couple of reasons. Every element has an atomic number that can be used as the last digit of an IP address. On my LAN, hydrogen resolves to 192.168.1.1, lithium is 192.168.1.3, carbon is 192.168.1.6, and so on. Every element also has a standardized abbreviation, allowing for short CNAMEs (h.local.domain, li.local.domain, c.local.domain, etc). Elements have classifications that can be applied to hosts. On my network, hydrogen is my router, rack-mount servers are alkali metals, embedded devices are noble gasses, gaming consoles are halogens, and laptops are other nonmetals.
Naming hosts after elements was not originally my idea. I heard about it a couple years ago on a forum, but I can’t find the thread now. I admit this naming convention is more for the massive nerd factor than practicality. If you have more than about 20 machines, just give them numbered hostnames and be done with it.(11 jul 2010)
> Your speculations raise a larger question: Can you think without language? Answer: Nope, at least not at the level humans are accustomed to.
Wait, I have a question: by thinking in language, does this mean, that, it’s very common for people (in the English speaking world) to think like there was a background voice speaking in your head, like the thinking bubble scenes depicted in movies and sitcoms?
As a Chinese, now I can think in languages (dual thinking in Mandarin and English), but in the school days I have developed a totally different, alternative way of thinking process.
All Indo-European languages have alphabet to represent syllables, but Chinese is not a language (Mandarin, Cantonese are languages), it’s a distinctively unique writing system. Why unique? Its logograms/logographs are not directly linked with phonemes but linked with the meaning itself.
When I do thinking and reasoning, I recall a concept by the word’s exact character shape and structure, then match with the picture of book pages I memorized, identify the corresponding semantics and then organize my result. This is way faster than thinking in languages like a background voice speaking in my head.
Elementary education in China has a technique called 默读, which means read without speaking, after we learned this, later we were taught to get rid of “read” altogether. We only scan the picture of one book page, and cache it as a static picture, then a question is raised about a particular word appeared in that page. We are demanded to recite the context out. This is called memorize-before-comprehend. After decades of training and harsh tests like this, we were totally used to treat thinking as pattern extracting from lines of sentences.
This is why Chinese find English grammar funny, a noun is a noun, it should be a static notation of things, easily recognizable universally, why the hell do people invent stuff like plural form to make obstacles for recognizing?
Human voices spectrum are way smaller than visual spectrum. And our brain is faster and more optimized at processing mass volume visual stuff(especially pattern recognition), does anyone else think in pictures?
Update 1: Anther reason why Chinese are soooooo obsessed with calligraphy. If some idea is really important we write it in an unforgettable, various artful way so the pattern extracting is even faster. And the calligraphy details contains rich hints and link to related ideas.(11 jul 2010)
The profoundly, prelingually deaf can and do acquire language; it’s just gestural rather than verbal. The sign language most commonly used in the U.S. is American Sign Language, sometimes called Ameslan or just Sign. Those not conversant in Sign may suppose that it’s an invented form of communication like Esperanto or Morse code. It’s not. It’s an independent natural language, evolved by ordinary people and transmitted culturally from one generation to the next. It bears no relationship to English and in some ways is more similar to Chinese—a single highly inflected gesture can convey an entire word or phrase. (Signed English, in which you’ll sometimes see words spelled out one letter at a time, is a completely different animal.) Sign can be acquired effortlessly in early childhood—and by anyone, not just the deaf (e.g., hearing children of deaf parents). Those who do so use it as fluently as most Americans speak English. Sign equips native users with the ability to manipulate symbols, grasp abstractions, and actively acquire and process knowledge—in short, to think, in the full human sense of the term. Nonetheless, “oralists” have long insisted that the best way to educate the deaf is to teach them spoken language, sometimes going so far as to suppress signing. Sacks and many deaf folk think this has been a disaster for deaf people.
The language of the deaf is a vast topic that has filled lots of books—one of the best is Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf by Oliver Sacks (1989). All I can do in this venue is sketch out a few basic propositions:
The effet tetris (French: Tetris effect) is a similarly named, but quite different phenomenon found in evolutionary AI systems. In the game of Tetris the player has two demands on his attention — the choice of an optimal placement for the new piece and the ability to maneuver that piece in the time allotted. The effet tetris then, is the effect whereby a hasty, but imprecise course of action is better than calculating an optimal move where such a calculation would not be completed in time; in short, evolutionary systems often find local rather than global optima.
So what should we do about the real danger of global warming? In my view, we should be funding investments in technology that would provide us with response options in the event that we are currently radically underestimating the impacts of global warming. In the event that we discover at some point decades in the future that warming is far worse than currently anticipated, which would you rather have at that point: the marginal reduction in emissions that would have resulted up to that point from any realistic global mitigation program, or having available the product of a decades-long technology project to develop tools to ameliorate the problem as we then understand it? (Why The Decision To Tackle Climate Change Isn’t As Simple As Al Gore Says | The New Republic)(11 jul 2010)
not doing work until he has to, and doing work he doesn't have to(11 jul 2010)
So I went off to the library, discovering, among other things, that Wittgenstein had a wealthy tyrant of a father and three brothers who committed suicide - three. With all the stubbornness and denial in the world, how could a father withstand such a repudiation? I wondered. And how, for that matter, did Wittgenstein withstand such an emotional hemorrhage? (THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LIFE OF LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN - NYTimes.com)(10 jul 2010)
I remember being especially impatient then with experimental fiction, not because I saw no need for experimentation, but because I wanted to read something more than noble intentions that had fizzled or convention in another disguise. On the other hand, I was equally tired of spare, realistic novels that explored the drab and aimless lives of various burnouts and emotional invalids, tired of the pervasive know-nothingism and navel-staring of fiction whose interest was surely more sociological than literary. (THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LIFE OF LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN - NYTimes.com)(10 jul 2010)
Pilots, too, have relied on pendulums. It is said that an airliner inbound to
New York in the 1950s lost all its gyroscopes in heavy weather over Block
Island. The captain was a wise old man who had risen with the airlines from the
earliest airmail days and was approaching retirement. A lesser pilot might have
fallen for the trap of intuition. But the captain simply took out his pocket
watch, dangled it from its chain, and began to swing it toward the instrument
panel. Flying by the pendulum and the compass, he proceeded the length of Long
Island in the clouds. After breaking into the clear near the airport, he landed
and wished his passengers a good day. (The Turn - 93.12)(10 jul 2010)
BIRDS are not the perfect flyers that you might expect. They cannot fly through
heavy rain. They get sucked up by thunderstorms, frozen by altitude, and burned
by lightning. They crash into obstacles, wander offshore, run out of fuel, and
die by the millions. They would rather not migrate in bad weather, and usually
don’t. Nonetheless, it now appears that Ocker and Crane may have been wrong:
there is evidence that some birds do occasionally fly inside clouds. This is
big news. Word of it appeared in 1972, in the proceedings of a NASA symposium
on animal navigation. Hidden among reports like “When the Beachhopper Looks at
the Moon” and “Anemomenotactic Orientation in Beetles and Scorpions” (that
is, “When a Bug Feels the Wind”) was a paper titled “Nocturnal Bird Migration
in Opaque Clouds.” It was written by Donald Griffin, the Harvard zoologist who
discovered the use of sonar by bats. Griffin reported that he had bought a
military surplus radar and on overcast nights in New York had tracked birds
that seemed to be flying inside clouds. There were only a few, and Griffin was
able to track them only for a couple of miles, but they appeared to be flying
straight. Griffin’s biggest problem was uncertainty over the flight conditions
at the birds’ altitude. Were the clouds really as thick as they looked from
below? Were the birds really flying blind? Griffin had good reason to believe
so, but as a scientist he had to be cautious. His final report, in 1973,
reinforced the earlier findings but was more cautiously titled “Oriented Bird
Migration in or Between Opaque Cloud Layers.” Ornithologists still cite it from
memory. To those interested in bird navigation, the difference between “in” and
“between” is just a detail; the point is, the birds seemed to know their way
without reference to the stars or to the ground. But to birds, whose first job
is keeping their wings level and controlling their turns, the distinction might
be crucial. Griffin, a former pilot, understands its importance. I recently
mentioned to him my impression that some ornithologists seem stuck on the
ground, and he laughed. “I keep telling them, ‘Gee, birds fly!’”
Assuming they fly in the clouds, the question is how? Ornithologists have no
answer, and they shy away from speculation. It is known that birds navigate by
watching the ground and the positions of the sun, the moon, and the stars —
none of which would help them in clouds. But they may also use a host of
nonvisual clues, and may use mental “maps” based on sound, smell, air currents,
variations in gravitational pull, and other factors. Experiments have shown
that some species are extremely sensitive to magnetic forces. In their heads
they have magnetite crystals surrounded by nerves, which may give them
intuitive knowledge of their direction (and location) in the earth’s magnetic
field.
Another possibility is that birds have internal gyroscopes of a primitive
sort. This is less farfetched than it seems: the rhythmic flapping of wings
could have the effect of Foucault’s pendulum, allowing a bird to sense turns
without any external cue. A pendulum is more than a hanging weight — it is a
hanging weight that has been pushed and is swinging freely. Swinging gives a
pendulum its special ability to maintain spatial orientation. Leon Foucault was
the French physicist who first used one, in 1851, to demonstrate the rotation
of the earth: though the pendulum appeared to change direction as it swung, in
fact the plane of its swing remained constant, and the apparent change was
caused by the turning of the earth underneath it. If birds rely on the pendulum
effect, they are not alone. Flies and mosquitoes (along with more than 85,000
other species of Diptera) use specially adapted vibrating rods to maintain
spatial orientation in flight. Not only can they turn sharply, roll upside
down, and land on the underside of leaves, but they can do it in fog. (The Turn - 93.12)(10 jul 2010)
Still worried about his near collision with the Statler Hotel, Carl Crane read
with fascination the descriptions of Doolittle’s flight. He was now, in 1929,
an Army instructor at a training base in Texas. Though his superior officers
disapproved of instrument flying, Crane was convinced of the need for
gyroscopes. He finally got permission to cover over a cockpit and turn one of
the biplanes into an instrument trainer. While he was at work on this, William
Ocker wandered into the hangar. Ocker didn’t look like much of a pilot, with
his bifocals and his mournful, puritan face, but he had a powerful mind and the
restless soul of a missionary. The truth about instrument flying had come to him in 1926, during a routine medical examination
in San Francisco. To demonstrate that the senses could be fooled, a doctor
had asked Ocker to close his eyes while being spun in a chair. Ocker felt the
chair begin to turn, and guessed the direction correctly — but when the chair
slowed, he felt it had stopped, and when the chair stopped, he felt it was now
turning in the opposite direction. For the doctor, it was a trick on the inner
ear, an amusing exercise in vertigo. For Ocker, it was a stunning revelation:
the sense of accelerating into a turn is the same as that of decelerating from
the opposite turn. The chair induced the same false sensations that led pilots
to mistrust their turn indicators. Even those who accepted their inability to
feel the bank were losing control. Ocker now knew why. He had found here in the
spinning chair the proof that instinct is worse than useless in the clouds.
Ocker became so obsessed with the spinning chair that he was hospitalized twice
for sanity tests and later banished by the Army to Texas. His preaching had
become tiresome. Nonetheless, he had discovered the most disturbing limitation
of human flight — the feelings that cause people to sway dizzily from
wings-level flight into spiral dives. Having gyroscopes is not enough. Pilots
must learn to believe them, even though their bodies may have invented phantom
turns. And fiction can be compelling. I have seen students break into a sweat
in the effort not to submit. (The Turn - 93.12)(10 jul 2010)
They are practicing ground strokes down the line — Rosset’s forehand and Hlasek’s backhand — each ball plumb-line straight and within centimeters of the corner, the players moving with compact nonchalance I’ve since come to recognize in pros when they’re working out: The suggestion is of a very powerful engine in low gear.(09 jul 2010)
This brings up a gripe I've been having with the word "blog", which is that it connotes hip shallow bullshit reading, like diary entries or gadget updates, when in fact most of the blogs that my friends and I read are basically essay depots for good writers with really specific interests.(09 jul 2010)
i'd say my big problem with constitutional law is that no words, however carefully crafted, were made to bear the weight of so much scrutiny(09 jul 2010)
choose three objects that best "sum you up." or try three wikipedia pages.(09 jul 2010)
people tend to be a lot more critical when you send them stuff about which they are apparently enthusiasts… and for a quite obvious reason.(09 jul 2010)
someone who's up at 5:45 either really has their shit together, or they really don't(09 jul 2010)
the joy of a late-night travel-weary arrival; the scene in seinfeld s3e3 (the pen)(08 jul 2010)
I have a bit of a bias in favor of protecting the enumerated rights even when the consequentialist calculus looks like it comes out the other way.(07 jul 2010)
One thing that does annoy me is the claim that these urinals “save” 40,000 thousand gallons of water a year. Water is not an endangered species. With local exceptions, water is a renewable resource and in plentiful supply. At the average U.S. price, you can buy 40,000 gallons of water for about $80.(07 jul 2010)
"i apologize" as a face-saving "i'm sorry"(07 jul 2010)
Google maps gives you a list of step-by-step directions when you submit a query. Choose two points in the contiguous United States such that the number of steps Google gives you is greater than for any other two points. How many steps would that be? What features would the two points have—would they be remote towns, cities with lots of one-way streets, etc.? Where would they be?
What is the average number of steps for every point-to-point query in the United States?
To this should be added some information for would-be rescuers of drowning people.
The instinctive drowning response is a climbing response. What you see are twin splashes as the person’s arms flail wide looking for something to grab on to. If they find it the automatic response is to grab it, climb up, and stand on top. The person doing this is panicked and has massively more strength than you think. If you are swimming and a young child does that to you, you will go under water. If you panic, you will get the same reflex, and will drown yourself.
Therefore if you wish to rescue someone who is drowning, you have 4 basic options.
1. The most common response is to go to them and try to rescue directly. If the water is shallow enough that you can stand, letting them climb up you can be OK. Otherwise this is suicide. Frequently one drowning leads to multiple others, and this is exactly how they get started.
2. Keep your distance and hand them something to climb on. They can’t see a pole to grab it, but if they touch, they will climb, which gives them air.
3. Wait until the drowning person is unconscious. Then go to them and tow them in. If you can’t stand in the water, and don’t have anything to do 2) with, this is recommended.
4. (For trained people only.) Swim up behind them, grab them from where they can’t grab you, and lift them up to get air. Talk soothingly to them until they relax, and then tow them in. If they get hold of you, DIVE so they let go, back off, circle around, and start again.
If you do not have lifeguard training then I strongly recommend against trying #4. Unless you know how to do the eggbeater you won’t know how to hold them out of water. And if they grab you, you have surprisingly little time to make the correct response before you are drowning as well.
Oh yes, and another data point. Drowning is the #1 cause of death in toddlers. It is quiet. It is fast. Beware of the backyard pool.
If you are a first year law student, the Coase theorem is a very powerful analytic tool for understanding the economics of tort law. When you study a new rule or problem, ask yourself, “How would this come out assuming zero transaction costs?” Then ask, “If we assume positive transaction costs, how does the problem change?”(06 jul 2010)
If we assume zero transaction costs, then when there are externalities, the market will reach the efficient outcome irrespective of how entitlements are assigned. Another mouthful! Let’s go back to our hypo:
Assuming zero transaction costs, it doesn’t matter whether the law assigns the right to generate sparks to the railroad or the right to be free from sparks to the farmer. Why not?Let’s work it out. There are two possibilities:
If we assign the entitlement to the farmer, the railroad will pay $100 in damages to the farmer for vioalting the farmer’s right to be spark free. The railroad will realize that it can save this $100 cost by investing $50 in a spark arrestor. So the railroad will buy the spark arrestor.
If we assign the entitlement to the railroad, the farmer will incur $100 in costs from the fire. The farmer will realize that he can save this $100 cost by entering into a contract whereby he pays $50 (plus some extra enducement, say $51 total) to the railroad in exchange for the railroad installing the spark arrestor. Since we have assumed zero transaction costs, the railroad and the farmer both benefit from this deal.
It's easy to take for granted the apparatus of civilization: the courts, garbage men, peaceful strangers, roads and police and clothing and markets and on and on and on, all neat and ready-made. But this intricate system, down to every roll of toilet paper and every rule of law, was once the simple product of a single human mind, a mere incremental improvisation. These complexly dependent structures weren't designed. No one is in charge. Our world frothed forth from a sea of blind invention, the product of an unconscious collective will. So while we may feel humble at the feet of our great institutions, and while we may bow to our capable keepers, we must know that we have none; that we are all clueless; that we made all of this up, alone, in the cold of interstellar space.
Think of New York: it is a behemoth, bustling, alive, and yet so orderly. Every person seems to be walking with a purpose, each in his assigned role, like ants working to sate their colony's demands. But the human city isn't natural; none of this has to exist. We have chosen to have laws and streets and supermarkets; this concrete we imposed upon ourselves; this traffic and these customs and these rules — all of these rules — are a fiction.
Is that what Marx meant when he said, "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man must at last with sober senses face his true condition in life, and relations with his kind"?(06 jul 2010)
These inoffensive folk seem to be hailing each other from enormous, icy distances of alienation, as though poles apart — naturally I am not thinking of Malayans or Chinese but of modern Europeans — they seem each to live in a fortress of pride, of threatened pride, of suspicion and wariness. What they say, objectively considered, is utter nonsense; it is the calcified hieroglyphics of that soulless world which we are constantly outgrowing but whose icy fragments continue to cling to us. Rare, rare indeed, are the individuals whose souls find expression in daily talk. They are even more than poets, they are almost holy men.(06 jul 2010)
what if you wrote a movie review the way guys in the nyt or the london review of books, or even venkatesh, wrote book reviews?(06 jul 2010)
i think on the micro scale, i.e. writing one poem, poetry might be an endeavor requiring less work. but on the macro scale, look at the career and body of work of a major or "great" poet, and it's harder for me to imagine becoming a "successful" poet than a successful novelist.
part of that is that the novel is a modern form, and has much less tradition to it(06 jul 2010)
In a paper that improved on ideas proposed by J. Mark Baldwin in 1896, Hinton and Nowlan (1987) suggested a mechanism by which learning during life could feed back information into the genome. Suppose there is some adaptation a creature could acquire that would improve fitness, and that accomplishing this adaptation requires discovering the setting for 30 binary switches, and unless they are all correct, the creature doesn't get any benefit at all. It would be very hard for evolution to find such an adaptation, because it could only discover it through search, not hill climbing. Evolution cannot get started on hill climbing because it does not get any feedback until it gets all settings right. So it has to create roughly 2^30, or a billion, creatures with different settings before it is likely to create one with the right settings Even when a creature is created with the right settings, evolution is not home free. The creature may not survive, or its children may not share its settings. In the (perhaps unrealistic) case where having most settings right does not help (the adaptation is not useful unless all the settings are right), the genome can easily find the correct settings in one individual, lose them in her children, and then undergo a random walk with no driving force back toward the correct settings. If it randomly walks any distance, it is almost like beginning the search from scratch again. The genome will have to find the settings many times before they are prevalent in the population, and even finding them once may require a prohibitive search.
But now suppose that the creatures have the ability to set 10 of these switches during life and that they search through the settings of these switches looking for a correct setting. Now evolution only has to set 20 of the switches correctly and the creature will do the rest. Evolution only has to create a million or so creatures to get these right, not a billion.
Moreover, the more switches that are preset correctly, the fewer learning trials the creature needs, thus the faster it can learn the concept, and the more likely the creature is to learn it. Thus, a creature with 22 switches preset correctly will be fitter than one with 21 switches preset correctly, which in turn will be fitter than one with 20 switches preset correctly. So, now evolution gets feedback and can hill-climb to set the switches correctly in the genome. This feedback from learned knowledge into the genome is called the Baldwin effect.
This phenomenon is related to the phenomenon we observed in Hayek on Blocks World when we added the random node to the language. The random node smoothed the fitness landscape and made it easier to home in on the best answer, in that case a reasonably lengthy code module computing NumCorrect. The learning smoothes the fitness landscape and makes it easier to home in on the true answer.
In our Hayek experiments without the random node, we found that even when evolution found a creature that correctly computed Numcorrect, the creature would not survive because the rest of its program had evolved to be fitter with a different module. So it was trapped in a local optimum. Getting to the true optimum then involved not merely getting the module right but tuning the rest of the code to the correct module.
A similar phenomenon is plausible for the interaction of evolution and learning during life. The creature may have evolved into a local optimum where, unless it gets all 30 switches correct, it is actually fitter with some of the switches in a different setting. In that case, it may be impossible for evolution to ever find the correct setting: the entire population may soon discover the wrong, locally optimal setting, and there will be little genetic diversity to play with in the search for an optimal creature. But if a number of the switches are modifiable during life, the creatures may be able to discover the correct setting even so, finding a setting within its modifiable settings that improves upon the local minimum it is otherwise trapped in.
Evolution most likely involves a sequence of moves from local optimum to local optimum. Wherever the creature's genome is, it will tend to evolve to be locally fit around that solution. To make progress involves getting to the next, more fit, local optimum. By facilitating a sequence of such moves, learning may make possible evolution that would be inconceivable without it.
We should be clear that it is not always fitter to put knowledge into the genome. As discussed in the previous section in regard to monkeys and snakes, in some contexts it is fitter to push knowledge into the genome, and in other contexts it is important that it remain to be learned during life. Knowledge pushed into the genome is there from birth, where that is important, and is reliably there. But knowledge that must be acquired is more flexible: if a creature happens to live in a region with no poisonous snakes, it doesn't have to startle whenever it sees a harmless one. Selection of the fittest is free to choose whichever alternative is fitter in any given context.
Hinton and Nowlan (1987) discussed the Baldwin effect in one particular context, where there were a number of binary switches to be set. But the effect is much more general than that. As long as a program evolves that codes for a machine that learns, there will be Baldwin-like effects. When the program is tweaked to improve its fitness, for example, by having the creature learn the knowledge more surely or more rapidly, that mutation will be conserved. As discussed throughout this chapter, there is in general a very fine line between knowledge that is learned and knowledge that is coded into the genome. Simply improving the bias so that one learns more rapidly and more surely is, in a sense, building more of the knowledge into the genome.
Ackley and Littman (1991) examined the interaction of learning and evolution in another context. They simulated the evolution of a population of simple creatures. The creatures lived and died and reproduced in a simple simulated environment. The creatures could eat plants and be eaten by carnivores. When they had accumulated enough food, they could reproduce. So their actions evidently affected their fitness.
The simulated creatures were controlled by two small neural nets. One neural net, called the action network, mapped from three sensory inputs to a hidden layer with two neurons, and from there to an output layer with two neurons that coded whether the creature moved north, south, east, or west at the next time step. The other neural net, called the evaluation network, mapped from the three sensory inputs to a single real-valued output node that represented an evaluation of the sensed state. The initial weights in both nets were coded into a 336-bit genome.
The weights in the evaluation network were fixed as specified in the genome, but the weights in the action network were, in some runs of the experiment, modified by a reinforcement learning algorithm in such a way that the action network learned to choose actions resulting in highly valued states. So, provided that the genome coded for an evaluation network making appropriate evaluations, the creature could learn over time to take better actions. Ackley and Littman performed experiments comparing the survival of populations when such learning was performed to survival when learning was disabled, and to survival of the population when evolution was disabled but learning enabled, and also performed other controls.
They found that learning was critical to the survival of populations for long periods of time. Runs with learning during life turned off died quickly. In fact, in their experiments, populations that evolved but did not learn survived no longer than populations with entirely fixed genomes. Moreover, learning plus evolution produced some populations that survived for exceptional lengths of time. Examining such runs in detail, they observed explicit manifestations of the Baldwin effect in these runs: populations began by learning important criteria such as to move toward food, and later evolution pushed these behaviors into the genome so that the creatures were born with the behavior.
Aside from reinforcing the results of Hinton and Nowlan in a somewhat more realistic context where learning did not consist of blind search through 10 or 20 binary settings, Ackley and Littman's results illustrate two features of particular interest in the context of this book: that compactness of description is critical and that one can more compactly and easily specify behavior by specifying goals than by specifying actions. A primary reason for the behaviors Ackley and Littman observed was that the evaluation network was quite small, consisting of only three weights. Creatures initiated with a useful setting for these weights could survive rather long, and in fact creatures would already be somewhat fit if the single weight that caused creatures to move toward food was positive. Thus, a very compact description, indeed to a large extent a description involving a single bit, ultimately determined the behavior of the creature. And, in this case, because this description was so compact, it was relatively easy for evolution to discover. In chapter 14, I discuss how biological evolution has exploited related (although somewhat more complex) mechanisms, coding creatures with an innate evaluation function that the creatures attempt to maximize during life and learn from by reinforcement. I argue there that this mechanism is seminal in the evolution of consciousness.(06 jul 2010)
It’s fairly common for people to respond to this sort of question by saying something along the lines of “I disapprove of organized religion, but have spiritual faith.”
My own view is exactly the opposite. I see the value in the ritual, community, and psychological “anchor” that organized religion can provide. But spiritual faith seems absurd
If something is festoonedwith, for example, lights, balloons, or flowers, large numbers of these things are hung from it or wrapped around it, especially in order to decorate it.(03 jul 2010)
many seemingly epiphanic moments (in the Joycean sense of "epiphany") seem to come from looking at something familiar through distant or unusual eyes, like thinking of a friend's friend from their father's point of view.(03 jul 2010)
Is this what I really look like? If so, we have one hell of a mirror.(03 jul 2010)
The idiot motorcycle mechanic holds himself out as a craftsperson, yet he is blithely unaware of his own incompetence. The intellectual failing is made possible by a prior moral failing: a failure to attend properly to the norms of a craft as well as a failure to maintain a disposition of humility and analytic inquiry.(02 jul 2010)
At the very least, the possibility of everyday anosognosia should prompt a disposition towards humility and analytic care, with an active concern to others(02 jul 2010)
The cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. Contrary to the cognitive psychologists’ own view of the matter … this cognitive capacity seems to be rooted in a moral capacity… . In the real world, problems do not present themselves unambiguously … so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly attentive to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is an ethical virtue.
It is this last thought that most interests me: a failure to attend to the possibility of error in one’s activities is not only a cognitive failure, but a moral one as well. Error can occur through a lack of care about the proper conditions for knowledge or an inattentiveness to the norms governing a practice or craft. These kinds of errors can be corrected either through training by others or through the willful decision of the individual to take care or attend properly to her activities.(02 jul 2010)
Here is the paradox. On the one hand, to be a good mechanic seems to require personal commitment: I am a mechanic. On the other hand, what it means to be a good mechanic is that you have a keen sense that you answer to something that is the opposite of personal or idiosyncratic; something universal. In Pirsig’s story, there is an underlying fact: a sheared-off pin has blocked an oil gallery, resulting in oil starvation to the head and excessive heat, causing the seizures. This is the Truth, and it is the same for everyone. But finding this truth requires a certain disposition in the individual: Attentiveness, enlivened by a sense of responsibility to the motorcycle … The truth does not reveal itself to idle spectators.
Pirsig’s mechanic is, in the original sense of the term, an idiot. Indeed, he exemplifies the truth about idiocy, which is that it is at once an ethical and a cognitive failure. The Greek idios means “private,” and an idiotes means a private person, as opposed to a person in their public role—for example, that of a motorcycle mechanic. Pirsig’s mechanic is idiotic because he fails to grasp his public role, which entails, or should, a relation of active concern to others, and to the machine. He is not involved. It is not his problem. Because he is an idiot.(02 jul 2010)
obviously one should balance
but like…
what's the point of math?
i think that's an important question here
it's going to be modeling and abstracting
so in a sense you want to teach kids how to break problems into routines
but maybe they should have more practice doing that too
i agree
but like.. i just didn't dig the real-life videos/extraneous information stuff
i thought that was actually bad
me: yeah, but you can have the one without the other
i'm with you on the real-world stuff, i think it's unnecessary, but then again i haven't taught a class full of 14 year-olds… maybe they need their attention grabbed with videos and shit
Sharon: those kids are weak and should be disposed of
no need to string them along by tricking them
eigth grade math: neat! math is about buckets and shit!
me: haha
you're an idiot
Sharon: college math: oh.. fuck.. math is about affine varieties over lie algebras..
again there’s an analogy to computer programming that i really like, which is that when you first start, all you’re doing is parroting other people’s code and trying not to break it… eventually you earn this facility with it and can play with it on your own terms, and of course it becomes a lot less scary and a lot less fragile(02 jul 2010)
The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D., is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening (source: CDC). Drowning does not look like drowning – Dr. Pia, in an article in the Coast Guard’s On Scene Magazine, described the instinctive drowning response like this:
Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. Th e respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled, before speech occurs.
Drowning people’s mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. The mouths of drowning people are not above the surface of the water long enough for them to exhale, inhale, and call out for help. When the drowning people’s mouths are above the surface, they exhale and inhale quickly as their mouths start to sink below the surface of the water.
Drowning people cannot wave for help. Nature instinctively forces them to extend their arms laterally and press down on the water’s surface. Pressing down on the surface of the water, permits drowning people to leverage their bodies so they can lift their mouths out of the water to breathe.
Throughout the Instinctive Drowning Response, drowning people cannot voluntarily control their arm movements. Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning and perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving toward a rescuer, or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment.
From beginning to end of the Instinctive Drowning Response people’s bodies remain upright in the water, with no evidence of a supporting kick. Unless rescued by a trained lifeguard, these drowning people can only struggle on the surface of the water from 20 to 60 seconds before submersion occurs.
6. My complaint about Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style has never been that everything they say is always wrong (though I do argue that most of their claims about grammar per se are misguided). What I argue against is, first, the fetishizing of vapid (though undeniably correct) style advice that is completely unhelpful because of its vagueness (“Be clear”, etc.), and second, over-general discouragement of constructions (adjectival modification, the passive, singular they, etc.) that are sometimes a good stylistic choice and sometimes not. (The latter is the old problem of educators who think if they do it too much they should be told not to do it at all. It’s mindless policy and leads to obnoxious stylistic bullying.)
7. The way to avoid needless bad choices in the grammatical structure of your writing is not to learn a short list of things you must always avoid; it’s to be sensitive to what’s a good idea and what’s a bad idea, on a basis of knowing the difference.(02 jul 2010)
feynman: "can you imagine how hard physics would be if electrons had feelings?"(02 jul 2010)
(A) Urn with 100 balls, 50 red and 50 black. You choose color, he picks ball; if it's your color, you win $10,000. Otherwise nothing.
(B) Urn with 100 balls, x red and 100 - x black. He chooses x in [0, 100]. You choose color. He picks ball; if it's your color, you win $10,000. Otherwise nothing.
One can look at charts to understand how long and intense the climb in prices has been, with inflation-adjusted prices of an average home in Vancouver doubling in the last 35 years, but it is much more fun to watch The Vancouver Real Estate Market Roller Coaster, a video posted by the anonymous owner of the website Vancouver Condo Info. Using software called NoLimits, the programmer turned that graph of inflation-adjusted home prices into a high-definition roller-coaster ride. Starting with a warning, “Please fasten your safety belt. Keep arms and assets inside ride at all times,” the years float by like mileposts during the ride: 1979, 1980, a long climb up to 1981, and then a harrowing drop down to 1983. But it is the ride up from 2000 to 2010 that is the steepest, and that, except for a brief drop in 2008, seems to go on forever. (Vancouver’s Real Estate Bubble Trouble - BusinessWeek)(02 jul 2010)
the bizarre notion of taking the constitution seriously, and enforcing its terms. (think of a priorly lawless land writing up a code and creating the institutions to enforce it.)(01 jul 2010)
the equivalent of photoshopping for words?(30 jun 2010)
do men today think they’re smaller, because of all of this pornography?(30 jun 2010)
Finally, I want to say that I still feel the pleasure and the gratitude that I felt when Mary Elizabeth Ledlie telephoned me from Chicago. And I love you all. I love you because you must love me. Anyway, that’s how I understand your liking my work, which is a large part of me. Thank you.(30 jun 2010)
I am well aware not only of the importance of children — whom we naturally cherish and who we also embody our hopes for the future — but also of the importance of what we provide for them in the way of art; and I realize that we are competing with a lot of other cultural influences, some of which beguile them in false directions.
Art, including juvenile literature, has the power to make any spot on earth the living center of the universe, and unlike science, which often gives us the illusion of understanding things we really do not understand, it helps us to know life in a way that still keeps before us the mystery of things. It enhances the sense of wonder. And wonder is respect for life. Art also stimulates the adventurousness and the playfulness that keep us moving in a lively way and that lead us to useful discovery.(30 jun 2010)
Shelley is a very interesting case to take a look into. The result is essentially universally accepted as desirable but almost nobody can find a good, principled justification. It reveals some deep problems with both the public-private distinction and the conflict between liberty and substantive, positive norms such as anti-discrimination.
Kuzinicki’s attempt totally falls flat on its face. The phenomenon he describes as being the key in Shelley - that the restrictive covenant is not a purely private act because it calls upon the government to enforce the act - is always true when you are in a lawsuit. The ultimate backing of any legal claim in the United States rests upon the ability of the U.S. government to coerce a given outcome if push comes to shove.
The sort of classic example is the Racist Dinner Party. Imagine a racist is hosting a dinner party and wants to deny access to all Canadians. He invites all of the people on his block except for the one Canadian who decides to come anyway. The Canadian further refuses to leave when asked, and the host knows he will be liable for battery if he forceably ejects him. Thus, he must call the police and rely on the law of trespass. But here the government becomes involved in enforcing an illegitimate racist norm - certainly, for example, the government cannot exclude members of a given race or nationality from a state dinner on that basis. So following Kuznicki’s argument, they would be prohibited from removing the Canadian from the host’s home. Under his terminology, the police would lack the power to enforce the law of trespass.
Now maybe we aren’t so horribly distressed by this outcome (I for one would say, though, that this has gone too far), but I can guarantee you that a card-carrying member of the Libertarian Cato Institute is not going to find this acceptable. And this is only a paradigmatic example. The nature of law as commands of the sovereign makes it a pretty universal phenomenon.(29 jun 2010)
If I had a New York Times op-ed column, it'd probably most resemble David Brooks's. This guy just writes about whatever the hell he feels like, in overly general terms and with shallow evidence, in a tone so generously laced with reasonableness that you'd think the guy invented common sense.(29 jun 2010)
In hyperbolic discounting, valuations fall very rapidly for small delay periods, but then fall slowly for longer delay periods. This contrasts with exponential discounting, in which valuation falls by a constant factor per unit delay, regardless of the total length of the delay. The standard experiment used to reveal a test subject’s hyperbolic discounting curve is to compare short-term preferences with long-term preferences. For instance: “Would you prefer a dollar today or three dollars tomorrow?” or “Would you prefer a dollar in one year or three dollars in one year and one day?” Typically, subjects will take less money today versus tomorrow, but will gladly wait one extra day in a year in order to receive more money.[1]
"…because when you're chewing gum, you don't look like you're too thrilled with anything anybody has to say… oh world war two, that was an important historical event? yeah, sure."(29 jun 2010)
Short, low pressure writing assignments (pp. 13-14): Lang recommends brief weekly writing assignments with low significance for student grades as a way of keeping track of how well students are learning the course content and for keeping them engaged on a consistent basis. I favor this, too, believing that we often don’t ask students to write frequently enough and there’s too much ‘put all your eggs in one basket’ in some philosophy courses (i.e.,the students write a few medium-sized papers and a term paper, say, with large portions of their grades hinging on them). Students need to go through the early stages of philosophical writing more often: thinking through a question or prompt, consulting the texts, fashioning a thesis, etc. Pre-writing is what separates solid philosophical work from the mediocre, so I’ve come to the conclusion that short assignments help give students more pre-writing practice. (In Socrates’ Wake: On Course, #1: Before the Beginning (The Syllabus))(29 jun 2010)
“Both race and sex … are most definitely physical, marked on
and through the body, lived as a material experience, visible as
surface phenomena and determinant of economic and political
status” (102). Because of the material reality of the
features and the immediacy of our perceptual response, the meanings
attached to such features become naturalised. (Feminist Perspectives on the Body (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy))(29 jun 2010)
So, for example, in “Throwing Like A Girl”
(1977) she points to studies which suggest that girls and boys throw in
different ways and that women, when attempting physical tasks,
frequently fail to use the physical possibilities of their bodies.
Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, when describing our body’s intentional
engagement in the world in the pursuit of its tasks, stress that we are
unaware of our body as a mere object among objects, rather it is the
point from which engagement begins and that which is the source of the
‘I can’ which founds our relationship to our environment.
Young suggests that the inhibited intentionality characteristic of
female embodiment derives from the fact that women often experience
their bodies as things/objects, “looked at and acted upon”
(2005, 39), as well as the source of capacities. “She often lives
her body as a burden, which must be dragged and prodded along, and at
the same time protected” (36). For Young, as for Beauvoir,
such experiences of embodiment are not a consequence of anatomy, but
rather of the situation of women in contemporary society.
Alcoff points out that phenomenological accounts “require a
cross-indexing by cultural and ethnic specificity” (Alcoff, 107),
but they point to significant ways in which female lived embodiment can
be an obstacle to intentional engagement with the world, as Beauvoir
had suggested. (Feminist Perspectives on the Body (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy))(29 jun 2010)
Nancy Mairs
describes living with multiple sclerosis “haunted by … a
mean spirited ghost … which trips you when you are watching
where you are going, knocks glassware out of your hand, squeezes the
urine out of your body before you reach the bathroom and weighs your
body with a weariness no amount of rest can relieve … my body
… is a crippled body … doubly other … by the
standards of physical desirability erected for everybody in our
world” (Mairs 1990/1997, 298–9). (Feminist Perspectives on the Body (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy))(29 jun 2010)
Various kinds of transgendered performances, in a
parallel way, challenge the link of anatomical shape and gender. The
trans community, problematised by sexual difference theory,
therefore comes to occupy a central position for Butler. They are
pivotal to the process of ‘queering’ by means of which the
gender binaries, established by normalising practices, are to be
undermined and unraveled. Such destabilisation, which is
Butler’s goal, is, however, not easy to undertake and its effects
are unpredictable. Its possibility, for her, is a consequence of
iterability, a feature of the meaning of discursive acts.
Following Derrida, Butler accepts that whenever we use a term or
perform an act we are engaged in a practice of citation: our usage
echoes imagined past and possible future uses, in a way that does not produce
stability of meaning. (Feminist Perspectives on the Body (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy))(29 jun 2010)
In the work of Judith Butler (1990, 1993, 2004), the subjection of
our bodies to such normalizing practices becomes not only a way in
which already male and female bodies seek to approximate an ideal, but
the very process whereby gendered subjects come into existence at all.
Femininity and masculinity become, broadly, bodily styles which our
bodies incorporate to yield a gendered subjectivity. Butler’s
performative account of gendered subjectivity has dominated feminist
theory from the beginning of the 1990’s. It was an account
which became widely discussed with the appearance of Gender
Trouble and has been developed in much of her work since. Butler
rejects the view that gender differences, with their accompanying
presumptions of heterosexuality, have their origin in biological or
natural differences. She explores, instead, how such a
‘naturalising trick’ is pulled off; asking by what means a
unity of biological sex, gendered identification, and heterosexuality
comes to appear natural. Butler, like Foucault, views
discourses as productive of the identities they appear to be
describing. When a baby is born and the midwife says “it’s
a girl” she is not reporting an already determinate state of
affairs, but taking part in a practice which constitutes that state of
affairs. The effect of repetition of acts of this kind is to make
it appear that there are two distinct natures, male and
female.
This became a major theme in 1970’s feminist writing. Andrea Dworkin
writes “In our culture not one part of a women’s body is left
untouched, unaltered …From head to toe, every feature of a
woman’s face, every section of her body, is subject to
modification” (1974, 113–4). From the 1990’s, feminist
attention to the power relations working through such
disciplinary practices has made extensive use of the work of Foucault
(Foucault 1979, Bartky 1990, Bordo 1993). Foucaultian insights
regarding disciplinary practices of the body are applied to the
disciplining of the gendered, and most insistently the female, body.
Such accounts stress the way in which women actively discipline their
own bodies not only to avoid social punishments, but also to derive
certain kinds of pleasure. Power works, here, not through physical
coercion, but through individuals policing their own bodies into
compliance with social norms. There are two key features of such
accounts. One stresses the way in which the material shape of bodies
is modified by such practices. The second that such modifications are
a consequence of such bodies carrying social meanings, signaling
within specific contexts, sexual desirability, or availability, or
respectability, or participation in social groupings. With attention
to the work of Foucault and other poststructuralist writers, also came
the recognition that practices of bodily modification could have
multiple meanings, with disagreements over responses to cosmetics,
fashion and cosmetic surgery (Davis 1997). It was against this
background that Bordo (1993) developed her complex and influential
reading of the anorexic body: “female slenderness … has a
wide range of sometimes contradictory meanings … suggesting
powerlessness … in one context, autonomy and freedom in the
next” (26).
Feminist writers from Wollstonecraft onwards have drawn attention to
the way in which dominant discourses in society prescribe norms in
relation to which subjects regulate their own bodies and those of
others. “Our bodies are trained, shaped and impressed with the
prevailing historical forms of … masculinity and
femininity” (Bordo 1993, 91). By regimes of dieting,
makeup, exercise, dress, cosmetic surgery, women, and increasingly men,
try to sculpt their bodies into shapes which reflect the dominant
societal norms. Such disciplinary practices attach not only to the
production of appropriately gendered bodies, but to other aspects of
the bodily identity subject to social normalization. Hair
straightening, blue tinted contact lenses, surgical reconstruction of
noses and lips, are practices in which the material shapes of our
bodies are disciplined to correspond to a social ideal, reflecting the
privileged position which certain kinds of, usually, white, always
able, bodies occupy.
Sharon: there is a nice little feeling of accomplishment from hiking
you also begin to realize how pioneers back in the day thought to an extent
because like… you don't really think about much of anything except your next step
and it's kind of amazing that you can do this for hours without really getting too bored
because.. in a sense.. that's like the fundamental job the brain is wired to do(29 jun 2010)
even if parts of "roughing it" irritated me, it'd be more than made up for by the thrill of feeling as though i'm roughing it(29 jun 2010)
Male bodies are those that have form or
identity, power and authority. Female bodies are defective male
bodies, marked by lack, the lack which forms the necessary and negative
opposite to the plenitude of masculinity; meanings matched with
imaginary associations in which female bodies are experienced as
chaotic, formless and threatening. In contrast to Lacan, Irigaray
challenges the inevitability of such imaginary and symbolic
forms. She argues for the need to reconstruct an inter-connected
imaginary and symbolic of the female body which is livable and positive
for women. Whitford suggests this is not an essentialist task of
providing an accurate description of women’s bodies as they
really are. It is a creative one in which the female body is lovingly
re-imagined and rearticulated to enable women to both feel and think
differently about their embodied form. Irigaray replaces the image of
female sex organs as a lack or a hole, with one in which women’s
genitals are seen as “two lips touching … Her sexuality,
always at least double, goes even further; it is plural … the
pleasure of the vaginal caress does not have to be substituted for that
of the clitoral caress. They each contribute irreplaceably to
women’s pleasure” (Irigaray 1997, 252). (Feminist Perspectives on the Body (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy))(29 jun 2010)
In childhood the young girl’s body is experienced in a
different way from that of the young boy. He is encouraged to climb
trees and play rough games. She is encouraged to treat her whole person
as a doll, “a passive object … an inert given object”
(306), and learns the need to please others. Here is the
beginning of her account of the way in which women live their bodies as
objects for another’s gaze, something which has its origin not in
anatomy but in “education and surroundings” (307). The
consequence of living a body as an object of another’s gaze is an
inhibited intentionality, her spontaneous movements inhibited,
“the exuberance of life … restrained” (323)
“lack of physical power” leading to a “general
timidity” (355). Beauvoir’s descriptions of the way
in which women live their bodies in such an objectified way,
internalising the gaze of the other and producing their bodies as
objects for others, has been one of her most important contributions to
a phenomenology of female embodiment, and anticipated the work of later
feminists such as Bartky and Marion Young, (see below). (Feminist Perspectives on the Body (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy))(29 jun 2010)
Why is the distinction between ex ante and ex post so important? Because it marks an important theoretical divide between consequentialist and deontological approaches to legal theory. Consequentialists, we might say, simply don’t care about the question whether A has violated the rights of B, for their own sake. Rather, a consequentialist cares about the consequences of attaching liability to those who act like A did. Ex ante, is a strict liability rule or a negligence rule more efficient? Deontologists, on the other hand, care very much about who has acted rightly and wrongly. In tort law, for example, corrective justice theories of tort are associated with the ex post perspective. A should be liable to B, only if A has acted wrongly.(29 jun 2010)
The ex post perspective is backward looking. From the ex post point of view, we ask questions like: Who acted badly and who acted well? Whose rights were violated? Roughly speaking, we associated the ex post perspective with fairness and rights. The ex postperspective in legal theory is also loosely connected with deontological approaches to moral theory. In general jurisprudence, we might associate the ex post perspective withlegal formalism.
The ex ante perspective is forward looking. From the ex ante point of view, we ask questions like: What affect will this rule have on the future? Will decision of a case in this way produce good or bad consequences? Again, roughly speaking we associate the ex ante perspective with policy and welfare. The ex ante perspective in legal theory is loosely connected with consequentialist(or utilitarian or welfarist) approaches to moral theory. In general jurisprudence, we might associate the ex ante perspective with legal instrumentalism (or legal realism).
WHY ONE SHOULD VALUE A PENNY, AND WHY I DON'T: A SHORT ESSAY PREPARED FOR DREW BLACKER AFTER AN INCIDENT IN WHICH I THREW A PENNY INTO A GARBAGE CAN FOR MY OWN ENTERTAINMENT
by James Somers
One Should
One should value a penny, firstly, because it's legal tender worth one one-hundredth of an American dollar. That is, it's not just a three-quarter-inch flattened cylinder of zinc and copper plating—-it's an object backed by a special guarantee from the government of the United States, the world's one extant superpower and sole controller of the most devastating military machine in history of mankind. Because of that, it can be exchanged for goods and services in just about every corner of the globe; who isn't happy to get their hands on even the tiniest sliver of our currency? In some places, as a matter of fact, a single U.S. cent is worth a whopping 5% of a worker's daily wage; that's the equivalent of more than $4.15 here.
Perhaps the more important fact is that pennies accumulate. A penny here and a penny there will, if you give them time, add up to a night out, or a pair of shoes, or a bottle of wine. You just have to take the long view; you have to think of a penny as the start of an enduring project, rather than an end in itself.
In a way, then, to not value a penny is to vote against patience and perseverance, to substitute for a steady program of incremental effort the quick cheap thrill of easy satisfaction.
That's not all you give up, though, when you disregard our humblest unit of currency. Your blithe indifference to the value of a penny betrays a dangerous attitude toward money in general, and toward life: it shows that you don't cherish all you have, all that you've earned, all that God and good fortune has bestowed upon you. And cherish it you must, for soon it will all be gone.
I Don't
After taxes I take home about $2,500 per month. Of that, I save $200; $1,200 more goes toward rent and utilities; I budget about $500 for food, and $300 for entertainment; the rest, $300, I spend on gifts and clothes and other miscellany.
On a daily basis, then, I might spend about $40, which is 4,000 pennies. In concrete terms, then, a single cent ends up being worth about 1/4,000th, or 0.025%, of my daily income. Not much.
But how often do I actually see pennies? I rarely pay for things in cash, and when I do, I often don't get any coins for change (say, at a restaurant). So in a given day I'm liable to only encounter somewhere between one and four physical pennies.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that this happened every day (it doesn't), and that instead of saving my four pennies, I threw them into garbage cans as I walked around the city, in a silly game designed to practice the kind of skills that come in handy in beer pong, or darts, or basketball. Would it be a waste?
Well, it would cost me about $15 per year. The question then becomes, what's worth more: $15 in a year, or 365 days of fourfold entertainment? I have no trouble saying it's the latter. Of course it is.
But we can generalize. Not having a physical penny, I'll argue, is actually better than having one (in which case it makes perfect sense to throw it away, whether as part of a game or not).
The trick is in seeing that the burden of carrying a penny — of having to handle the grimy bacterial metal in the first place, of having to fish it out of your pocket for laundry, of having to find a cup or jar for it at home, of having to listen to it clanking around while you walk, of having to pick it (and all of its friends) off of your floor and out of the deep corners of your couch, etc., etc. — ends up costing you more, in wasted time and effort, than its intrinsic monetary value. This is because there are virtually no stores in America, and certainly not in New York, that will sell something for a single penny. If the coins are useful, it's only for rounding purchases off to cleaner numbers; that's why we have "take a penny, leave a penny trays" trays: the things have become so valueless that we are better off giving them away.(28 jun 2010)
I'm curious to know what progress you all have made on the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness. I'm pretty sure I've only spoken to Aa and J about it; I don't remember if J had a view, but I believe Aa thought it was the great problem, in a class of its own, and possibly intractable.
Here are my own thoughts:
When I imagine the world without me, I think of it as still having trees, and grass, and books, and buildings, and people and planets and stars. But this is quite plausibly a picture of the map, not the territory. Maybe what I should be imagining is "a dynamic mess of jiggling things," as Feynman put it, since that's what the world actually is before it's filtered by my brain.
I bring this up because when I think of the world this way—in its raw form—it becomes much harder to see where phenomenal experience fits in. How does red arrive on the scene, when all we have is are "clouds of complex amplitude in configuration space"?
I can imagine two possibilities: one, following Chalmers, is that experience is fundamental in the way that mass and space-time are fundamental. In this view, qualia can't be explained in any simpler terms, and humans have a rich inner life simply because we have a perceptual apparatus that gives us access to those "atoms" of experience.
The other possibility, and the one that I prefer, is that our brains have evolved (a) an excellent map of the world's structure, i.e., we think that atoms are dense where atoms really are dense, and (b) the means to "read" that map, i.e., a kind of inner perception that operates just on brain-data (compare "outer" or regular perception, which takes world-data as input and spits out brain-data).
Data become representations which cohere into symbols, one of which is the "I" and that inherits the world and can exert top-down pressure. Observing the brain shit gives even a richer picture than what comes in through the eyes, for instance: 2D -> 3D (imagine a watcher studying the symballs).
A thermostat has the map (a) but no (b). A zombie has (a) and (b) but no
I think I imagined that some kind of super-complicated self-watchery would give rise to a rich inner life, and that the strange loops responsible could in principle be built (or evolved) by humans in silico.
Hey,
I think you might enjoy this brief talk from the podcast called "Philosophy Bites," in which the philosopher John Campbell discusses physicalism and phenomenality. Here's the money quote:
Brain scientists hunt assiduously…
This is essentially what Chalmers said and what yesterday I had been calling your "option two." But the way it's formulated by Campbell is easier to swallow, I think, especially because he gets you thinking, earlier in the podcast, in terms of levels of description. Baum, our picture of the world not being so far off from "what it really looks like," mathematical physics has a misleading dominance, etc. sensational–phenomenal color of something is just as real a property as its mass, but
Easier to swallow when you think in terms of levels of description.
Computer monitor, turn down brightness, where is the image?(28 jun 2010)
“As a mathematical discipline travels far from its empirical
source, or still more, if it is a second and third generation only
indirectly inspired from ideas coming from ‘reality’, it is beset with
very grave dangers. It becomes more and more purely aestheticizing,
more and more purely l’art pour l’art. This need not be
bad, if the field is surrounded by correlated subjects, which still
have closer empirical connections, or if the discipline is under the
influence of men with an exceptionally well-developed taste.
“But there is a grave danger that the subject will develop along
the line of least resistance, that the stream, so far from its source,
will separate into a multitude of insignificant branches, and that the
discipline will become a disorganized mass of details and
complexities.
“In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or
after much ‘abstract’ inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger
of degeneration. At the inception the style is usually classical;
when it shows signs of becoming baroque the danger signal is up. It
would be easy to give examples, to trace specific evolutions into the
baroque and the very high baroque, but this would be too technical.
“In any event, whenever this stage is reached, the only remedy
seems to me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the
reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas. I am convinced
that this is a necessary condition to conserve the freshness and the
vitality of the subject, and that this will remain so in the future.”
that episode where i unwrapped a stick of trident, threw the gum away, and ate the wrapper.(27 jun 2010)
Normally when we ask “Where is X?” we really have two questions in mind that happen to have the same answer. First “Where do I look for X?” and second “Where would I tell someone else to look for X?” If X is a stapler on the table, then the answer to both questions is just “X is located on the table.”
These two questions come apart in the case of consciousness. If I ask “Where is my consciousness?” the answer to the second question is something like “in my brain” while the answer to the first question is something like “everywhere and nowhere” or whatever you want to say. But the reason why the answer to the first question is somewhat bizarre or unique isn’t so surprising after all when it is phrased this way. When a consciousness is looking for itself of course it is going to appear to lack a particular spatial location because that consciousness takes up the entire point of view from which we are asking the questio(27 jun 2010)
As previously noted, there seems a lot of unhelpful ambiguity in the traditional treatment of responsibility as a two-place relation between an individual and the acts or outcomes that they are “responsible for”. It seems better understood as a three-place relation between an agent, an action (or period of agency, picked out de re), and the outcomes for which their action renders them liable. This extra structure more clearly separates the ‘agential’ and ‘outcome’ aspects of responsibility.
(To illustrate: suppose Jekyll knowingly takes a drug which causes him to go berserk, and subsequently kills a man. We can then say that he is responsible, in taking the drug, for the man’s death. This is much clearer than the traditional claim that he’s “responsible for killing the man”, since there’s an important sense in which the killing was not a free act or ‘locus of responsibility’ at all, done as it was under the influence.)
The time taken for a bus to complete its duties is related to the number of people attempting to board or alight at stops. The bus that is already late tends to attract a higher number of riders due to the longer headway between it and the previous bus. The higher number of riders boarding the bus results in delaying it further. At the same time, the following bus tends to collect fewer passengers, because its headway is shorter due to the delay of its predecessor, and hence it spends less than expected time on stops, which further shortens its headway (unless it deliberately idles on stops or slows down).
“I was standing on a busy interjunction in New Delhi with the traffic and the din and the scooters and the bikes and the elephants and the cows, and I remember thinking: These people have got something that we’ve lost. Our traffic rules and sanitation and systems make life easier and more convenient, ensure longer lifespans and perhaps a fairer society. But these things come at a cost, and the cost is what I felt there. There’s a velocity and density of life there that you don’t get in the West, and that I found oxygenating.”(25 jun 2010)
As the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano was spewing plumes of ash into European airspace in April, shuttering airports and stranding millions, the British novelist David Mitchell, a tall, gracious, high-spirited man of 41, was marching me across a long, flat tidal beach near his home in Ireland’s West Cork. Along the way, he told me a story about the perils of humility. “I had a short and rather valuable lesson,” Mitchell said after a morning on the beach, “one of these warnings that the universe gives you on a platter sometimes. I’d done an event in New Zealand at a very large auditorium, hundreds of people, and I was kind of pleased with it; it had gone well. A woman came up to me afterwards, a medievalist at the university there, and she said, ‘Have you heard of the humility topos?’ I said no. She explained that, in the medieval era, humility was seen as a great virtue. The humility topos was used for these abbots — you can think of a good one in Eco’s ‘Name of the Rose’ — who were actually monsters of arrogance, but were always banging on about how humble they were — ‘Just like our lord Jesus Christ. We serve him in humility’ — when they were the least humble people you can find in history. Some even became pope. And the woman looked at me and said, ‘Watch out for the humility topos.’ And then sort of disappeared in a puff of smoke.”
I asked him what he thought the woman was responding to.
“I’m from a time and place,” Mitchell said after some deliberation, “where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you’d get cut down for it by your peers and parents. I’m not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome. So my stage persona is self-effacing. Though it was a little harsh of the woman in New Zealand — and I felt a bit unjustly bruised — I actually was pleased as well. She gave me the idea that you shouldn’t present a persona of cultivated pretensionlessness. False modesty can be worse than arrogance.”(25 jun 2010)
To the Editor:
My first thought after reading about grade inflation at our nation’s law schools: Let’s hope the medical schools don’t follow suit.
Jack Hassid
New York, June 22, 2010(25 jun 2010)
Courts treat self-incriminating statements by criminal informants as a significant factor favoring the reliability of the informant’s information when making probable cause determinations for the issuance of search warrants.(25 jun 2010)
Conation is a term of relatively recent origin that is synonymous with motivation/will/drive, the preferred terms in psychological discourse. From the Latin verb “conari” which means to attempt or to strive. (conation in English - Google Dictionary)(23 jun 2010)
"their failure to appreciate the world as it really is cuts no ice with science" (nice phrase)(23 jun 2010)
the trick is to be effervescent and enthusiastic(23 jun 2010)
“I am often asked why macroeconomic theory is in such an awful state. The answer is simple. The basic model of the market economy was laid out by Leon Walras in the 1870′s, and its equilibrium properties were well established by the mid-1960′s. However, no one has succeeded in establishing its dynamical properties out of equilibrium. But macroeconomic theory is about dynamics, not equilibrium, and hence macroeconomics has managed to subsist only by ignoring general equilibrium in favor of toy models with a few actors and a couple of goods. Macroeconomics exists today because we desperately need macro models for policy purposes, so we invent toy models with zero predictive value that allow us to tell reasonable policy stories, the cogency of which are based on historical experience, not theory.
I think it likely that macroeconomics will not become scientifically presentable until we realize that a market economy is a complex dynamic nonlinear system, and we start to use the techniques of complexity analysis to model it. I present my arguments in Herbert Gintis, “The Dynamics of General Equilibrium“, Economic Journal 117 (2007):1289-1309.
Bryars was interested more in experimenting with the nature of music than forming a traditional orchestra. Instead of picking the most competent musicians he could find, he encouraged anyone to join, regardless of talent, ability and experience. The only rules were that everyone had to come for rehearsals and that people should try their best to get it right and not intentionally try to play badly. The first recording made by the Sinfonia was a floppy 45rpm disc of Rossini’s William Tell Overture, which was sent out as the invitation for the degree show that year.
The early repertoire of the Sinfonia was drawn from standard classical repertoire (such as “The Blue Danube” waltz and “Also sprach Zarathustra”), so that most orchestra members had a rough idea of what the piece, or at least famous parts of it, should sound like; even if they could not play their chosen instrument accurately, they would at least have an idea that they should be going higher at one part then lower at another, and so on. The end result was the musical ensemble producing not only the correct note but several notes nearby, ‘clouds of sound’ that gave an average impression of the piece.
well that’s the only way you get good, isn’t it?(19 jun 2010)
And how many real kids who have grown up with Buzz Lightyear and Sheriff Woody have unspooled their own improvised movies on the rec room floor? Perhaps no series of movies has so brilliantly grasped the emotional logic that binds the innate creativity of children at play to the machinery of mass entertainment. Each one feeds, and colonizes, the other. And perhaps only Pixar, a company Utopian in its faith in technological progress, artisanal in its devotion to quality and nearly unbeatable in its marketing savvy, could have engineered a sweeping capitalist narrative of such grandeur and charm as the “Toy Story” features. (Movie Review - Toy Story 3 - Voyage to the Bottom of the Day Care Center - NYTimes.com)(18 jun 2010)
Having great components is not enough. We’ve been obsessed in medicine with having the best drugs, the best devices, the best specialists—but we’ve paid little attention to how to make them fit together well. Don Berwick, of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, has noted how wrongheaded this is. “Anyone who understands systems will know immediately that optimizing parts is not a good route to system excellence,” he says. He gives the example of a famous thought experiment in which an attempt is made to build the world’s greatest car by assembling the world’s greatest car parts. We connect the engine of a Ferrari, the brakes of a Porsche, the suspension of a BMW, the body of a Volvo: “What we get, of course, is nothing close to a great car; we get a pile of very expensive junk.” Nonetheless, in medicine, that’s exactly what we have done. (News Desk: The Velluvial Matrix: The New Yorker)(18 jun 2010)
There is an important aspect of tort liability that doesn’t make an appearance in Epstein’s argument. Liability does more than provide compensation and internalize costs, laudable as those goals are. As Benjamin Zipursky and John Goldberg have argued it also gives those who have been harmed a way of acting against those that have harmed them. Tort lets those who have been hurt by BP strike back, asserting themselves are more than passive objects of harm or compensation. If the proponents of civil recourse theory are to be believed — and I find myself more than a little persuaded — this is a goal worthy of attention in its own right.(17 jun 2010)
american psycho as "an absurdist comedy masquerading as a psychological thriller… a perfect satire of 80s business culture and an eminently quotable script."(16 jun 2010)
"was shakespeare gay? next, we talk to a 7th grade boy who says he definitely was"(16 jun 2010)
Some unordered remarks on attitude:
The attitude in some ways is best defined obliquely, in terms of what it tries to oppose.
Why am I repulsed by assertive "I" talk, especially from girls? Is it only from girls? Is it because I doubt (or envy) that they have a neat fixed articulation of themselves? Is it because it's used as a way of setting oneself apart from, or above, others? Is it because it's a way of telling instead of showing?
I think it's the fact that they're telling themselves a story about themselves that they enjoy. Consider sh's response to my question, "Where are you from?", that "it's sort of long and complicated." I think of this process as being dangerous. It's the apparent lack of awareness that ego is being built with such statements.
Indulgent self-typing.
There is a certain combination of intellectual power and humility that I find irresistible. That is, I'm drawn to people who are simultaneously smart—-demonstrably so—-and ambivalent, not just about their smarts, but about how one ought to live.
The idea of taking (a tempered form of) Aumann's agreement theorem deadly seriously. When someone opposes you, taking that as evidence against your position. More broadly, taking other people's way of living as evidence against (the supremacy or even sensicality of) yours. The idea that "we are all clueless" effects a dramatic leveling of the playing field.
A lot of what gets to me here can be recast as someone's seeming to have a clue about something, a clue that other people don't have, which seeming strikes me as small and desperate. Like they want a clue or need to feel as though they have it.
How reflexive is one's imaginative empathy? When does it turn on? When one is at odds oneself, or only when one is observing another conflict?
What was so disturbing about Franny was her disgust. She was disgusted by people! Humans!
Peeves as a gateway to revulsion.
Being able to sympathize or at least understand the lowliest corners of experience. If an unfamiliar example crops up, pausing and working to imagine it. Running simulations.
Not bothering about the fratty guys at the bar who are being rude and rambunctious is not just about dissociating to calm your nerves. It's not just about "ignoring them" or putting them out of your mind. It's about actively trying to appreciate their fun on their terms, and being heartened or cheered up or at the very least not pissed off by what you discover in their minds.
What about the vociferous leader of a hate group? "I can't understand how someone could get that way." Can't you? Work to imagine it! What did you learn?
The idea that A.O. reviews movies "on their own terms" — that he scopes his remarks to what the movie itself is trying to accomplish, rather than by some sort of external measuring stick. Like a Hume-Ramseyian theory of utility — one's particular ends are not the issue, only how far along one is to achieving those ends.
the fact that the square on the backboard of basketball nets has no instrumental purpose (beyond being a visual aid for the players), and no impact on the rules(15 jun 2010)
i don't think i knew that "compunction" meant remorse(15 jun 2010)
If you countermand an order, you cancel it, usually by giving a different order(15 jun 2010)
"modulo x" as, "what's left when you factor out x"(15 jun 2010)
But certain actions we do think about - certain actions we deliberately plan. We plan them very quickly in our mind. The point to bring out here is that when a character knows what he’s going to do, he doesn’t have to stop before each individual action and think to do it. He has planned in advance in his mind. For example - say the mind thinks, “I’ll close the door - lock it - then I’m going to undress, and go to bed.” Well, you walk over to the door - before the walk is finished, you’re reaching for the door … before the door is closed, you reach for the key … before the door is locked, you’re turning away - while you’re walking away, you’re undoing your tie - and before you reach the bureau, you have your tie off. In other words, before you know it, you’re undressed - and you’ve done it with one thought, “I’m going to go to bed.”
A lot of valuable points could be brought out to the men in showing them that it is not necessary for them to take a character to one point, complete that action completely, and then turn to the following action as if he had never given it a thought until after completing the first action. Anticipation of action is important.
This enters into animation in many ways and we have many serious difficulties coming up because of the men’s inability to visualize things in the proper way.(15 jun 2010)
In the study of other problems, is it possible to bring out more the exaggeration of form and action - as in the study of the balance of the body? Can we bring that out even to an exaggerated point? It will probably make it stronger to them - make them realize more the necessity of that balance of the body - and yet point out how they can utilize that to strengthen their business when they get into animation, as in bending. In someone bending over - can we show the exaggeration in that action by showing how the pants pull up in back to an exaggerated degree that becomes comical? Can we show how the coat stretches across the back, and the
sleeves pull up and the arms seem to shoot out as from a turtle-neck as they shoot out of the sleeves? What can we do to bring these points out stronger to the men?
In lifting, for example - or other actions - we should drive at the fundamentals of the animation, and at the same time, incorporate the caricature. When someone is lifting a heavy weight, what do you feel? Do you feel that something is liable to crack any minute and drop down? Do you feel that because of the pressure he’s got, he’s going to blow up, that his face is going to turn purple, that his eyes are going to bulge out of their sockets, that the tension in the arm is so terrific that he’s going to snap? What sensations do you get from someone rising - different ways of rising? Sitting? When somebody is sitting - when he sits down and relaxes, does it look as if all the wind goes out of him? Does he look like a loose bag of nothing? Also, in pushing… in the extremeness of a push, the line shoots right down from the fingertips clear down to the heel. In pulling - show the stretch, and all that. Bring out the caricature of those various actions, at the same time driving at the fundamentals of them - the actual.(15 jun 2010)
Take for example, the walk. Why can’t you teach the fundamentals of a straight walk yet combine it with some person that is giving an exaggeration or a comic interpretation of a straight walk. Perhaps for very elementary instruction, it might be best to present straight action; but not to keep giving them straight action as they progress and gain a little experience… Start them going into the comedy angle or caricature angle of the action. For example - a fat person, with a big pot belly: What comedy illusion does he give you?
You could at the same time instruct the classes regarding the reason why he has to move a certain way (because of his weight, etc.) Present the walk soliciting discussion on:
What illusion does that person, fat with pot-belly, give you as you see him?
What do you think of as you see him walking along?
Does he look like a bowl of jelly?
Does he look like an inflated balloon with arms and legs dangling?
Does he look like a roly-poly?
In other words, analyze the fat person’s walk and the reasons for his walking that way…. BUT DON’T STOP UNTIL YOU’VE HAD THE GROUP BRING OUT ALL THE COMEDY THAT CAN BE EXPRESSED WITH THAT FAT PERSON’S WALK; also all the character - but drive for the comedy side of the character.
Take a skinny person - somebody that’s loose jointed, angular, shoulder blades showing - what does he suggest? Does he look hung together with wires like a walking skeleton? Does he look like a marionette flopping around? Does he look like a scarecrow blowing in the wind? What illusion is created by the walk, by the movement, of that skinny loose-jointed person?
In discussing a short person, with short legs - he would naturally have quick movements - seems to move very fast - would have to take twice as many steps as a taller person, thus making him look as if he were going at a greater speed. What illusion do you get from a person like that? Does he strike you as a little toy wound up and running around on wheels? Does he look like a little Pekinese pup? A dwarf? or midget?
There are a number of things that could be brought up in these discussions to stir the imagination of the men, so that when they get into actual animation, they’re not just technicians, but they’re actually creative people.(15 jun 2010)
Thus, “a symbolic form… is not some ‘intermediary’ in a process of ‘communication’ that transmits the meaning intended by the author to the audience; it is instead the result of a complex process of creation (the poietic process) that has to do with the form as well as the content of the work; it is also the point of departure for a complex process of reception (the esthesic process) that reconstructs a ‘message.’” (Nattiez 1990, p.17)
Poïesis is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term ποιέω, which means “to make”. This word, the root of our modern “poetry”, was first a verb, an action that transforms and continues the world. Neither technical production nor creation in the romantic sense, poïetic work reconciles thought with matter and time, and man with the world. It is often used as a suffix as in the biology terms hematopoiesis and erythropoiesis, the former being the general formation of blood cells and the latter being the formation of red blood cells specifically. (Poiesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(15 jun 2010)
Sorry. Their persistence back there in the shadowy realms of collective memory testifies not only to the vexing ontological riddle that is Steve Guttenberg, but also — at least as profoundly — to a notable aspect of our deep human craving for narrative. Anyone who has told a child a bedtime story knows that its conclusion is met with the demand for “another one” — for the same one again, but a little bit different. Movies are far from the only medium to cater to this desire.
I used to think of New York as being overwhelmingly hectic. Every visit seemed to leave me panting and panicky, half-late, half-lost, frustrated and tired and ill-at-ease. For a long time I thought that it was features of the city itself — its assertive steel promontories, the honking yellow flotillas on every block, its teeming compacted communities — that were conspiring in some peculiar way to disrupt my calm.
But the reality is that I just always visited New York for specific appointments — dinners, shows, meetings — in unfamiliar areas, appointments for which I was usually late and for which I was often carrying bulky luggage. My accommodations were always ad hoc, my MetroCard close to empty, my bus or train home scheduled for some off-peak and inconvenient time. I was never in the city for no particular reason; I never arrived there fully rested; I was never comfortable without a map or directions. In short, I never came close to treating the place the way you would if you actually lived there.
Settling in here, then, has maybe been a bit like making the transition from “frequent flyer who only experiences the airport as harried traveler” to “the clerk at the souvenir shop who whiles away a full eight-hour shift and lives fifteen minutes away by car.”(14 jun 2010)
Moreover, as the psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons show in their new book “The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us,” the effects of experience are highly specific to the experiences themselves. If you train people to do one thing (recognize shapes, solve math puzzles, find hidden words), they get better at doing that thing, but almost nothing else. Music doesn’t make you better at math, conjugating Latin doesn’t make you more logical, brain-training games don’t make you smarter. Accomplished people don’t bulk up their brains with intellectual calisthenics; they immerse themselves in their fields. Novelists read lots of novels, scientists read lots of science. (Edge: MIND OVER MASS MEDIA By Steven Pinker)(14 jun 2010)
Russian roulette problems:
What is the most that you would be willing to pay (in installments over the rest of your life) to remove the bullet in a game of RR with six chambers?
How much would you have to be paid (in cash or elsewise) to be willing to play RR?
How many chambers would I have to add before you were willing to play RR?
There is a similar trajectory in what you choose to build. In stage 1 you write programs that are conspicuously missing features; in stage 2 you write programs that have too many features (and yet may still be missing some important ones); in stage 3 you write programs that do exactly what’s needed.
My experience suggests that one good way to speed the transition to stage 3 is to try to make your programs short. When I was writing On Lisp I spent a lot of time working on programs that had to be short enough to be reproduced in the book, and this cured me of the tendency to pile on features.
Nonetheless, there are some obvious puzzles about the relationship of particulars to general legal theories. Consider the role of particulars (data or observations) in the empirical sciences. If well-confirmed data conflict a scientific theory, there is a sense in which the theory is in serious trouble. Of course, observation may be theory laden, and the interpretation of data is subject to revision. But in some sense, we believe scientific theories are answerable to our particular beliefs about the world, and we don’t think is is good scientific practice to “revise the data” in order to “fit the theory.”
But in legal theory, the data does not seem recalcitrant in quite the same way. If we have a powerful normative theory, then perhaps our intuitions are in error. If we have a doctrinal theory that fits most of the cases, then perhaps the rest of the cases are in error. Perhaps, but this sort of revision is called into question by the priority of particular. Particularism suggests that our beliefs about individual cases are more reliable than our general theories.(13 jun 2010)
The Harvard program is focused on k-12 teaching. At its core is a workshop, in which groups of teachers (most of whom are unacquainted with one another previously) discuss videos of other teachers teaching in the classroom, led by Wagner or one of his colleagues. The aim is to develop a language for discussing instruction — and to come to some sort of interpersonal agreement on standards of practice. Like most teachers, his participants have spent very little time observing other teachers do what they do, and are not practiced in rigorous detail-oriented discussion of what works and what doesn’t. Initially the reactions to what they are observing are very diverse — there is no agreement about whether what is being done is good or bad teaching. But over the course of the workshop the participants develop a common understanding, and a language for expressing it.(13 jun 2010)
The Constitution allows Congress to pass copyright laws to “promote the progress of science” — a word often used in the 18th century to mean “knowledge”. The stated purpose of the original 1790 copyright statute was to encourage learning. So you tell me — what promotes knowledge and learning: letting people rearrange music and learn to use a video camera, or threatening new artists with $150,000 fines?(13 jun 2010)
Current law favors copyright holders. But morally, there’s nothing wrong with singing your heart out. Remixing isn’t stealing, and copyright isn’t property. Copyright is a privilege — actually six specific privileges — granted by the government. Back in 1834, the Supreme Court decided in Wheaton v. Peters that copyrights weren’t “property” in the traditional sense of the word, but rather entitlements the government chose to create for instrumental reasons. The scope and nature of copyright protection are policy choices — choices that have grown to favor the interests of established, rent-seeking businesses instead of the public in general.(13 jun 2010)
Many speech scholars would describe the scarcity rationale this way: government can impose rules on TV and radio broadcasters that it could not impose on pamphleteers and newspapers because of the technological scarcity of usable wireless frequencies.
If I had a radio set (or a TV with bunny ear antennas) and two or more people transmitted at 88.1kHz, my radio set could not play any of the signals. Rather than hearing speech, I would hear static and crosstalk.
As a result, back in the 1920s and 1930s, the US government gave licenses to certain companies to broadcast at certain frequencies, and forbade others from broadcasting without licenses. Because only a few companies received the licenses (and government kicked a lot of groups off the airwaves), the government imposed rules and guidelines on the broadcasters to ensure covered important local issues, public issues, and generally to do so “fairly.”
The scarcity rationale, importantly in this account, results in a different “standard of scrutiny” than applied to other media speech—not strict scrutiny, but often intermediate or even apparently lower scrutiny.(13 jun 2010)
Theombudsman is an independent official who has been appointed to investigate complaints that people make against the government or public organizations.(13 jun 2010)
Sexual entitlement, according to Deborah Tolman, a professor at Hunter College and author of “Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality,” has instead become the latest performance, something girls act out rather than experience. “By the time they are teenagers,” she said, “the girls I talk to respond to questions about how their bodies feel — questions about sexuality or desire — by talking about how their bodies look. They will say something like, ‘I felt like I looked good.’(12 jun 2010)
In some parts of the country, the authorities stage dawn bed checks. “Someone shows up at your house with a badge and a gun, unannounced,” said Laura Lichter, an immigration lawyer in Denver. “ ‘Hi, we’re here from immigration. Do you mind if we come in to look and see if two towels are wet?’ ”
While Stokes makes such home visits off-limits in New York State, lawyers and immigrant advocates complain that, at its worst, the process is a Kafkaesque version of “The Newlywed Game”(12 jun 2010)
That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.(12 jun 2010)
After that, we will concentrate on real chess training. We will try to find
better ways to communicate the chess knowledge from the engine to the user.
A computer program should be just as good at training a human as it is at playing
a tournament game. Of course, computer training will always have its relative
strengths and weaknesses – a computer program has graphical capabilities
which no human trainer can match, while linguistic expression will probably
be awkward for machines for a long time to come. There are of course also areas
(for example, the psychology of practical play) which are relatively difficult
for a computer to understand. (ChessBase.com - Chess News - Rybka 4 is here – and stronger than ever)(11 jun 2010)
The relative plausibility theory is an explanatory account of juridical proof in Anglo-American court systems. Its central feature is that proof at trial is organized over competing stories advanced by the litigants, and that decision in civil cases is for the more plausible of the stories, or the more plausible of the set of stories, advanced by the parties as explanations of what occurred. If the fact finders construct their own explanation of what occurred, which is possible, nonetheless the explanation will be fashioned in light of the competing explanations offered by the parties, and essentially by definition will be the most plausible of the accounts considered by the fact finder. In criminal cases, fact finders find guilt if there is a plausible story of guilt and no plausible story of innocence; otherwise, they find innocence.(11 jun 2010)
In Russia, the ‘Ask the Audience’ lifeline isn’t one that the contestant would often use because the audience often gives wrong answers intentionally to trick the contestants. (TheMoneyIllusion» Ed Dolan on China and Russia)(11 jun 2010)
The Hawthorne effect is a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve or modify an aspect of their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they are being studied,[1][2] not in response to any particular experimental manipulation. (Hawthorne effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(11 jun 2010)
catabolic - destructive part of metabolism(10 jun 2010)
snakes and ladders as a terrible game, but still compelling…(09 jun 2010)
shambolic = chaotic, disorganized, or mismanaged(08 jun 2010)
Prolepsis (plural prolepses; from Ancient Greek προ-λαμβάνειν, pro-lambánein, to anticipate) can be:
A figure of speech in which a future event is referred to in anticipation. For example, a character who is about to die might be described as “the dead man” before he is actually dead. The same device can be used in non-verbal media such as film, where it is also called flashforward.[1]
The anticipation of an objection. For example, a speaker might say “‘Ah’, you say, ‘but that is impossible!’” Here the speaker is anticipating the objection ‘Ah, but that is impossible!’ from his audience—and is probably about to refute that objection before it arises. This form is more accurately called procatalepsis.[2]
A grammatical construction that consists of placing an element in a syntactic unit before that to which it would logically correspond. Example: “That noise, I just heard it again”, where that noise grammatically belongs in place of it.
A philosophical concept used in ancient epistemology (in particular by Epicurus and the Stoa) to indicate a so-called “preconception”, i.e., a pre-theoretical notion which can lead to true knowledge of the world.(07 jun 2010)
Jennings said that his scouts, in response to the “unsuitability of the indigenous population of Britain” — children who are too sedentary and spend their time with video games — were increasingly focused “on the inner city of London, among Africans, Eastern Europeans and Caribbeans.”(05 jun 2010)
Americans like to put together teams, even at the Pee Wee level, that are meant to win. The best soccer-playing nations build individual players, ones with superior technical skills who later come together on teams the U.S. struggles to beat. In a way, it is a reversal of type.
—
Americans place a higher value on competition than on practice, so the balance between games and practice in the U.S. is skewed when compared with the rest of the world. It’s not unusual for a teenager in the U.S. to play 100 or more games in a season, for two or three different teams, leaving little time for training and little energy for it in the infrequent moments it occurs. A result is that the development of our best players is stunted. They tend to be fast and passionate but underskilled and lacking in savvy compared with players elsewhere. “As soon as a kid here starts playing, he’s got referees on the field and parents watching in lawn chairs,” John Hackworth, the former coach of the U.S. under-17 national team and now the youth-development coordinator for the Philadelphia franchise in Major League Soccer, told me. “As he gets older, the game count just keeps increasing. It’s counterproductive to learning and the No. 1 worst thing we do.”
—
An elite American player of that age is still likely to be playing in college, which the rest of the soccer-playing world finds bizarre. He plays a short competitive season of three or four months. If he possesses anything approaching international-level talent, he probably has no peer on his team and rarely one on an opposing squad. He may not realize it at the time, but the game, in essence, is too easy for him.(04 jun 2010)
By age 15, the boys are practicing five times a week. In all age groups, training largely consists of small-sided games and drills in which players line up in various configurations, move quickly and kick the ball very hard to each other at close range. In many practice settings in the U.S., this kind of activity would be a warm-up, just to get loose, with the coach paying scant attention and maybe talking on a cellphone or chatting with parents. [hmmm] At the Ajax academy, these exercises — designed to maximize touches, or contact with the ball — are the main event. “You see this a lot of places,” a coach from a pro club in Norway, who was observing at Ajax, said to me. “Every program wants to maximize touches. But here it is no-nonsense, and everything is done very hard and fast. It’s the Dutch style. To the point and aggressive.”(04 jun 2010)
One man, Ronald de Jong, said: “I am never looking for a result — for example, which boy is scoring the most goals or even who is running the fastest. That may be because of their size and stage of development. I want to notice how a boy runs. Is he on his forefeet, running lightly? Does he have creativity with the ball? Does he seem that he is really loving the game? I think these things are good at predicting how he’ll be when he is older.”(04 jun 2010)
Everything about the academy, from the amenities to the pedigree of the coaches — several of them former players for the powerful Dutch national team — signifies quality. Ajax once fielded one of the top professional teams in Europe. With the increasing globalization of the sport, which has driven the best players to richer leagues in England, Germany, Italy and Spain, the club has become a different kind of enterprise — a talent factory. It manufactures players and then sells them, often for immense fees, on the world market. “All modern ideas on how to develop youngsters begin with Ajax,”(04 jun 2010)
the new default meaning of the word “poster”(04 jun 2010)
the present tense in historical narratives(04 jun 2010)
peculiar development of the market for domain names(01 jun 2010)
"right here, right now, this very moment today"(30 may 2010)
dude if you type H-A-R into wikipedia it like suggests harvard(28 may 2010)
trying to re-record a voicemail, but failing, with boops and fucks and fumbling(28 may 2010)
the "authentic" problem, and how it relates to wanting to pay bills online(28 may 2010)
A review of the Court’s jurisprudence yields two principal lessons about the modern doctrine of stare decisis. First, the doctrine is comprised largely of malleable factors that carry neither independent meaning nor predictive force. Second, most of the factors that populate the doctrine are best understood as evincing, either explicitly or implicitly, a driving concern with the reliance interests that could be upset by the decision to overrule a given precedent.(24 may 2010)
Suppose that a trustworthy demon threatens to kill ten innocent prisoners unless our protagonist, Sally, wins their freedom. He presents her with three buttons, and explains that the rules are as follows: Exactly one of the first two buttons (A or B) is fixed to set all ten prisoners free, while the other won't free any. Alternatively, she can play it safe by pressing button C, which is guaranteed to save nine of the ten prisoners. What should she do? [This is a variation on Parfit's “mineshaft” case, or Jackson's case of the three medical treatments.] Suppose that, though Sally does not know this, button A is in fact the one that will save all ten. It then seems that we can identify an 'objective' sense in which she 'ought' to press button A. That would be the best decision, in light of the actual facts of the situation. On the other hand, there's a straightforward (if more 'subjective') sense in which she 'ought' to play it safe and press button C. That'd be the most wise or rational decision, given the information available to Sally at the time of her decision. We can thus intuitively grasp a distinction between 'objective' and 'subjective' oughts, though it remains to be seen how we might precisely explicate or analyze these notions.(24 may 2010)
Gardner himself does not own a computer (or, for that matter, a fax or answering machine). He once did—and got hooked playing chess on it. “Then one day I was doing the dishes with my wife, and I looked down and saw the pattern of the chessboard on the surface of the water,” he recalls. The retinal retention lasted about a week, during which he gave his computer to one of his two sons. “I’m a scissors-and-rubber-cement man,” Gardner says, although he feels he ought to get another computer despite the lasting impression his first one left.
In his living room in Hendersonville, N.C., near the Great Smoky Mountains at the Tennessee border, he rattles off several of these notables. Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford, now a best-selling author about consciousness and the brain, first became famous after Gardner reported Penrose’s finding of tiles that can coat a plane without ever repeating the same pattern. John H. Conway of Princeton University saw his game-of-life computer program, a metaphor for evolution, flourish after appearing in the column. Most surprising to me, though, is Gardner’s mention of the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, whose work he helped to publicize in 1961. He points to an original Escher print over my head, between the shelves of his wife’s collection of antique metal doorstops. If he had known Escher would become famous, Gardner says, he would have bought more. “It’s one of the rare pictures with color in it,” he remarks. “It’s based on Poincaré’s model of the hyperbolic plane.”
The Pingry English Department’s goals can be summed up in Francis Bacon’s famous triad: “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.” (Pingry School: English)(24 may 2010)
extended endgames at the abp and tolf in the yard(22 may 2010)
treacy: operational excellence (think Amazon), customer intimacy (think Home Depot's helpful handholding clerks), and product leadership (think Apple)(21 may 2010)
… the intense hepatic demands of senior spring(21 may 2010)
Normally we think of symmetry as a property of a shape. But group theorists focus more on what you can do to a shape — specifically, all the ways you can change it while keeping something else about it the same. More precisely, they look for all the transformations that leave a shape unchanged, given certain constraints. These transformations are called the “symmetries” of the shape. Taken together they form a “group,” a collection of transformations whose relationships define the shape’s most basic architecture.(21 may 2010)
the zoom maneuver that makes a fool out of the self-satisfied, demonstrated very clearly in the opening sequence of modern family s01e24(21 may 2010)
I’ve had a lot of success doing it that way at Fog Creek. The process starts every September, when I start using all my resources to track down the best computer science students in the country. I send letters to a couple of hundred Computer Science departments. I track down lists of CS majors who are, at that point, two years away from graduating (usually you have to know someone in the department, a professor or student, to find these lists). Then I write a personal letter to every single CS major that I can find. Not email, a real piece of paper on Fog Creek letterhead, which I sign myself in actual ink. Apparently this is rare enough that it gets a lot of attention. I tell them we have internships and personally invite them to apply. I send email to CS professors and CS alumni, who usually have some kind of CS-majors mailing list that they forward it on to.
Eventually, we get a lot of applications for these internships, and we can have our pick of the crop. In the last couple of years I’ve gotten 200 applications for every internship. We’ll generally winnow that pile of applications down to about 10 (per opening) and then call all those people for a phone interview. Of the people getting past the phone interview, we’ll probably fly two or three out to New York for an in-person interview.(20 may 2010)
The main purpose of this screen seems to be so that users blame themselves when they hit reload and find themselves blown back to step one. Oh darn! I'm so stupid! say the users. Yes, that's what happens. Watch any usability test where the product is failing - the users inevitably blame "their own stupidity." Better that 100,000 users should feel stupid than one programmer admit he didn't do a very good job.
Don't let anyone tell you that as a programmer you don't have to make moral or ethical decisions. Every time you decide that making users feel stupid is better than fixing your code, you're making an ethical decision.(20 may 2010)
When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon. The firing forces him to keep his head down so he can't fire at you. (That's what the soldiers mean when they shout "cover me." It means, "fire at our enemy so he has to duck and can't fire at me while I run across this street, here." It works.) The motion allows you to conquer territory and get closer to your enemy, where your shots are much more likely to hit their target. If you're not moving, the enemy gets to decide what happens, which is not a good thing. If you're not firing, the enemy will fire at you, pinning you down.(20 may 2010)
Jared is a bond trader. He is always telling me about interesting deals that he did. There’s this thing called an option, and there are puts, and calls, and the market steepens, so you put on steepeners, and it’s all very confusing, but the weird thing is that I know what all the words mean, I know exactly what a put is (the right, but not the responsibility, to sell something at a certain price) and in only three minutes I can figure out what should happen if you own a put and the market goes up, but I need the full three minutes to figure it out, and when he’s telling me a more complicated story, where the puts are just the first bit, there are lots of other bits to the story, I lose track very quickly, because I’m lost in thought (“let’s see, market goes up, that mean interest rates go down, and now, a put is the right to sell something…”) until he gets out the graph paper and starts walking me through it, and my eyes glazeth over and it’s very sad. Even though I understand all the little bits, I can’t understand them fast enough to get the big picture.
And the same thing happens in programming. If the basic concepts aren’t so easy that you don’t even have to think about them, you’re not going to get the big concepts.
Serge Lang, a math professor at Yale, used to give his Calculus students a fairly simple algebra problem on the first day of classes, one which almost everyone could solve, but some of them solved it as quickly as they could write while others took a while, and Professor Lang claimed that all of the students who solved the problem as quickly as they could write would get an A in the Calculus course, and all the others wouldn’t. The speed with which they solved a simple algebra problem was as good a predictor of the final grade in Calculus as a whole semester of homework, tests, midterms, and a final.(20 may 2010)
While Twitter doesn't explicitly ask for or subsequently publish any age or gender data for its users, we can approximate both on a large scale using common demographic indicators such as the user's first name. While some names like "David" have relatively even distributions across birth years (which we can compute using information from the US Social Security Department), other names are heavily biased toward certain generations. "Jasmyn," for instance, is far more likely to be the name of a teenager now than someone named "Pearl"; if your name is "Arsenio" and you were born in the US, it's over 99% likely that you're a male born between the years of 1989-1991. With this statistical information, we can compute a probability distribution for the entire age range between 12 and 75 and increment the weight count of each word according to this distribution.(19 may 2010)
The approach I took on Diffle (http://www.diffle.com/ - unfortunately it hasn't been exercised as we haven't really got traction yet) was to store the comment ID as a varbinary(255). A child comment takes the ID of the parent and then appends a 2-byte sequential number. So, the first comment is 0x0001, the second is 0x0002, a reply to the second is 0x00020001, a second reply is 0x00020002, the third is 0x0003, a reply to the third is 0x00030001, etc. To find the children of a comment, you look for all comments where the parent's ID is a prefix. MySQL can use leftmost-prefixes as indexes, so this computes very quickly. Also, with the standard varbinary collating order, 0x01 sorts before 0x0101, 0x0102, 0x02, etc, so all I have to do is order by the ID and everything will come out in proper threaded order. And nesting depth is calculated easily by len(id) / 2.
Reordering can be done just by looking at all records whose IDs contain the parent as a prefix and have a length 2 greater than the parent, and then renumbering them. This should be computationally feasible in most cases.
This does limit users to 65,536 replies to a single comment, and a maximum comment nesting depth of 127. Based on my experience with some very active LiveJournal threads, I considered these to be acceptable limitations (LJ limits comments to 5000/post anyway). A nesting depth of 127 would be nearly 2400 pixels over, so it's not like it'd all fit on one screen anyway.(19 may 2010)
I read about a study a few years back that required participants to spend some time with a member of whatever gender they're most attracted to. Each pair was required to (I think) do something slightly exciting and challenging together, talk about something significant, and look into each other's eyes a lot.
If I remember it correctly, several of the pairs from the study were engaged shortly thereafter.(19 may 2010)
Her run-on syntax binds the poems into a kind of living tissue, which means that cutting out passages like this for quotation does more than the usual violence. (Sea Change: a review | Jorie Graham)(19 may 2010)
dissertate: hold forth: talk at length and formally about a topic(18 may 2010)
Pajamas — not the sexy sleepwear you find at Victoria’s Secret, but loose-fitting, non-revealing PJs made of cotton or polyester — have been popular in Shanghai since the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping, then China’s leader, sought to modernize the economy and society by “opening up” to the outside world. The Chinese adopted Western pajamas without fully understanding their context. Most of us had never had any dedicated sleepwear other than old T-shirts and pants. And we thought pajamas were a symbol of wealth and coolness.
Shanghainese began wearing them to bed — but kept them on to walk around the neighborhood, mainly out of convenience. At that time in Shanghai, people lived in crammed, communal-style quarters in shikumen — low-rise townhouses in which families shared toilets and kitchens. Through the 1980s and ’90s, the average person had less than 10 square meters of living area. To change out of one’s pajamas just to walk across the road to the market would be too troublesome and unnecessary.
how dfw can see and think and write brilliantly, but how part of it is based on a trick, of being able to convincingly assume an expert's voice and vocabulary(17 may 2010)
what would DFW say about Rosetta Stone software?(17 may 2010)
the seeming overuse of the word "furtive"(17 may 2010)
When we write about poetry, however, we don’t tend to say “I had good muse that day”, or “I had good awen”. There isn’t really a word for poetic inspiration that’s heavily loaded with the connotation of the paradox of creation: that we only create based on what we already know. (Nebulous Concepts)(17 may 2010)
Although the database entries for the positions you see when playing from the Anand-Topalov position are classically the opposite of random, they sure look random, which ones are wins or draws. Can they be used in applications where one desires pseudo-randomness, but also wishes to leverage the digested information of an -complete or -complete problem? There have been several papers in the past few years on the problem-solving power of deep strings, in general or specifically those that are witnesses for SAT. Certainly intense computational power has gone into building the files, so one feels they should provide power for doing something else.
In the 19th century, city transit systems were rail-based, first with horse-drawn cars and later with cable cars. Around 1890, streetcars began to be powered by electricity, and streetcar companies built large generating facilities to produce the needed electricity. They began to sell their surplus electricity to consumers and, in time, their electric businesses outgrew their transit businesses.
NGC 1999 is a familiar object to a lot of astronomers. The odd shape of the dark spot (it’s always reminded me of a Shuttle Orbiter) makes it fairly iconic. So this news is a bit of a shake up; I was delighted when I read it. I love it when we see something new under any circumstances, but something we thought we knew — something we could almost dismiss as being well-enough understood that it was no big deal — to find out it’s actually unique and wholly unexpected… well, that’s just awesome.
Surprises in science are the best results you can get. Nothing makes scientists happier than having to turn their pencils around and use the other end. (16 may 2010)
On absorbing as much knowledge as he has: Learning has never been work for me. It’s play. I was born innately curious. If that doesn’t work for you, figure out your own damn system.(16 may 2010)
The Financial Times is the most intellectually impressive, in my opinion. The Wall Street Journal, too. I don’t know anyone who’s wise in a worldly sense that doesn’t read newspapers every day. It’s an obvious correlation.(16 may 2010)
The secrets of this show’s success are manifold. To begin with, both the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders are, shall we say, easy on the eye. They play against a colorful cast of witnesses and defendants. (How many successful young actresses got their start by playing teen psycho killers on the show?) And there’s the dependable formula—discovery of body, wisecrack, false start, arrest, interrogation, release, arrest of the correct perp, indictment, suppression motion, shocking new evidence, impassioned argument by Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), verdict—usually, thank heaven, guilty. W.H. Auden once described mystery stories as progressing from innocence to common guilt and back to innocence again: “The law becomes a reality and for a time all must live in its shadow, till the fallen one is identified. With his arrest, innocence is restored, and the law retires forever.”(15 may 2010)
Surveying this explicit variety of sources may help to avoid an otherwise-natural confusion. These stylebooks are not about the nature of (the formal written variety of) the English language: each of them documents (aspects of) one organization’s policy about how to represent this language in writing, typically covering a limited set of cases that are both reasonably common and somewhat variable in general practice.
Some people are tempted to treat policies of this kind by analogy to the theological differences among religious sects. Believers are convinced that one set of policies is (or should be) God’s Truth, with the others to be consumed in the fires of hell, while skeptics think that they’re all just different forms of nonsense.
Both of these attitudes seem to me to misread the situation. Once you decide, for whatever reason, that representational consistency is a Good Thing, then you need to deal with the Long Tail of Linguistic Complexity. It’s tempting to think that there are a few basic axioms from which the Right Answer could always be logically derived for any question of linguistic analysis — and perhaps some day a future linguistic Peano will give them to us. But as things stand, questions of linguistic representation are more like common law than like set theory. The only known way to achieve reasonably consistent results is to reason from a very long list of precedents, which is always in the process of gradual development, with occasional major revisions. This rational catalogue of worked examples is meant to be consistent with a hierarchy of more general principles, but it’s not reducible to them.(13 may 2010)
I’m often puzzled why some usages get such opprobrium (in the face of the actual practice of good writers) while others go unnoticed and uncommented on. Recently, I’ve been looking at preposition + of (out/outside/inside/alongside/off of) versus plain preposition (I intend to post on this eventually); many usage advisers are hostile to the versions with of: the of is said to be “superfluous” (Omit Needless Words!); the usage is (in most cases, incorrectly) labeled “colloquial”, or even “non-standard”; it’s believed to be more recent than the alternative (the of has been, inexplicably, added); and it’s less frequent than the alternative. Meanwhile, nobody seems to pay any attention to except for vs. plain except (“Nobody talked, except (for) Kim”), though you could try to mount a case against this for similar to the case against of.
Once a proscription — even a silly one, like Dryden’s Rule, banning stranded prepositions — is in the marketplace, it tends to persist. But where do the proscriptions come from? Here, there’s an enormous amount of randomness: somebody in the usage community happens to notice something that offends him (it’s almost always a man) in some way — often because he views it as colloquial or innovative or regional or used by the wrong sort of people, occasionally because that’s not the way you do things in Latin — and writes or teaches about it. We then end up with a collection of personal quirks and accidents of history, a big grab-bag of assorted stuff. Speaker-oriented hopefully gets excoriated, while speaker-oriented frankly and so on get a free pass. Sentence-initial linking however is judged to be poor style, while sentence-initial linking consequently and so on escape the red pencil. I could go on like this for quite some time. (Language Log: The social psychology of linguistic naming and shaming)(13 may 2010)
Social annoyance and public griping reinforce one another.
By social annoyance I mean a distaste for the way someone looks or acts that sees its object as an instance of a type. Someone’s appearance or behavior gets under your skin, and it’s not just that particular person, it’s the whole class of people who look like that or act like that. And usually it’s not just a random set of people, it’s kids today, or jocks, or German tourists, or 30-something suburban women in Hummers, or those people who hang out with so-and-so. You associate the irritant with some salient combination of social features: race, ethnicity, age, sex, class, location, occupation, clique.
By public griping I mean the process of sharing your annoyance with a sympathetic group. You might trade anecdotes around the coffee machine or the dinner table, or write a letter to the editor. People enjoy listening in groups to skillful expressions of social annoyance, and so stand-up comedians do a lot of this. Cartoons and newspaper columns often express similar feelings, and allow you to join in by putting a clipping or printout up on your refrigerator or your office door. These days, you might send a copy to your friends by email, or chime in on your weblog.
In some places and times, linguists might have been presiding over the speech and language sessions of this ritual reinforcement of group identity. But these days, our reaction is generally to observe that most of the gripes are arbitrary and many of the explanations are false.
the method of writing in which you commit one sentence at a time, with no back-revisions(13 may 2010)
“Non-strict” functional languages, such as Haskell, have another powerful feature: they
only evaluate as much of the program as is required to get the answer
- this is called lazy evaluation. This feature is rather
like Unix pipes. For example, the Unix command
grep printf Foo.c | wc
counts the number of lines in the file Foo.c that include the
string printf.
The command
grep printf Foo.c
produces all lines which contain the string “printf”,
while the “wc” command counts them. The pipe,
written “|”, takes the output from the first command
and delivers it to the second. The two commands execute together, so
that the output of the first is consumed more-or-less immediately by
the second. In this way, no large intermediate files need be
produced. You can think of wc “demanding”
lines from the grep.
If the second command only needs some of the output of the first, then
execution of the first command might never need to be completed. For
example,
grep printf Foo.c | head 5
just prints the first 5 lines which contain “printf”.
There is no need to modify the grep command to take account of
the fact that its execution might be abandoned.
Non-strict languages provide exactly this kind of demand-driven
evaluation. Data structures are evaluated just enough to deliver the
answer, and parts of them may not be evaluated at all. As in the case
of Unix commands, this provides powerful “glue” with which
to compose existing programs together. What this means is that it is
possible to re-use programs, or pieces of programs, much more
often than can be done in an imperative setting. Lazy evaluation allows us to write more modular programs.
The first line reads:
“When you sort an empty list ([]), the result is another empty list”.
The second line reads: “To sort a list whose first element is named x and
the rest of which is named xs, sort the elements of xs that are less than x, sort the elements of xs that are greater than or equal to x, and concatenate (++) the results, with x sandwiched in the middle.”
Anyone who has used a spreadsheet has experience of functional
programming. In a spreadsheet, one specifies the value of each cell
in terms of the values of other cells. The focus is on what is
to be computed, not how it should be computed. For
example:
we do not specify the order in which the cells should be calculated - instead we take it for granted that the spreadsheet will compute cells in an order which respects their dependencies.
we do not tell the spreadsheet how to allocate its memory - rather, we expect it to present us with an apparently infinite plane of cells, and to allocate memory only to those cells which are actually in use.
for the most part, we specify the value of a cell by an expression (whose parts can be evaluated in any order), rather than by a sequence of commands which computes its value.
An interesting consequence of the spreadsheet’s unspecified order
of re-calculation is that the notion of assignment is not very useful.
After all, if you don’t know exactly when an assignment will
happen, you can’t make much use of it! This contrasts strongly
with programs in conventional languages like C, which consist
essentially of a carefully-specified sequence of assignments, or Java,
in which the ordering of method calls is crucial to the meaning of a
program.
This focus on the high-level “what” rather than the
low-level “how” is a distinguishing characteristic of
functional programming languages.
sometimes it's funny to write things in all caps, because it gives you a kind of "crazed" voice
DOESN"T IT?!
but if you wanted to write a time in all caps, to sort of crazily stress that you'll be awake till that time, that you have an appointment at that time, etc., you'll be hard-pressed to make it happen
because saying 5AM looks just about as normal as saying 5am
Multiple Choice: If you choose an answer to this question at random what is the chance you will be correct? A) 25% B) 50% C) 60% D) 25%
Random picks from set of correct answers is 25% in cases where there are 4 options. But what if 25% is listed twice as an option? Then random pick will be right 50% of the time, but if 50% is right, the chance of picking it at random is 25%… but if it's 25% then it's 50%, but if it's 50% then it's 25%.(11 may 2010)
Reification is a process through which a computable/addressable object—a resource—is created in a system, as a proxy for a non computable/addressable object. By means of reification something that was previously implicit, unexpressed and possibly unexpressible is explicitly formulated and made available to conceptual (logical or computational) manipulation. Informally, reification is often referred to as “making something a first-class citizen” within the scope of a particular system. (Reification (computer science) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(11 may 2010)
Kids can keep you up all night but it’s all worth it. Domestic animals give love freely to the least deserving, but their lives are short and their ends are often brutal. And it’s worth it. It is all worth it. Every day, even a sad day blurred by headaches and filled with business meetings, is magical and infinite. This dance, this particular proton dance, will never come again. This tune we’re too busy to hear will not be played again. Never forget to be thankful for your life (Life is Beautiful – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report)(11 may 2010)
The idea of open-sourcing the games after a set goal is achieved is interesting. Could there be some future business model there?
However that said, there are a couple of amusing cases I know about where deliberately making something ugly was an A/B testing win. Photoshop found that by setting ugly default fonts they push people to poke around the application to change the defaults, which results in a lot more usage of other features.(11 may 2010)
What do you mean by anagram solver? Find anagrams for a given word? Isn't that trivial by indexing words by the sorted version of the word? E.g. {"aep" -> ["ape", "pea"], …}(11 may 2010)
Y is the applicative-order fixed point operator for functionals.(11 may 2010)
ask "what set of subroutines would make it trivial to write this application?"… then write those subroutines, and write your application with them(10 may 2010)
My prediction is this: ebooks will kill the mass market paperback distribution channel.
The “mass market” is not a book size, even though it’s associated with the ubiquitous C-format paperback; rather, it is an abstraction of the magazine/periodical distribution system. MMPBs are shipped out in the publication month. They are sold on terms that require the booksellers to pay for sold units 90 (or 120) days after receiving them — or to destroy the books and provide proof of destruction (the stripped covers). This is how magazines are sold via newsagents, albeit magazines are sold/stripped after one month, not three or four. The strip-and-pulp thing is an artefact of the cost of returning outdated periodicals — paperbacks don’t go out of date but are costly to ship and warehouse, so it has traditionally been easier to treat them as a kind of long-duration un-dated magazine.
When Warren lectures at business schools, he says, “I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches—representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all.”
He says, “Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.”(09 may 2010)
However, optimizing compilers are by no means perfect. There is no way that a compiler can guarantee that, for all program source code, the fastest (or smallest) possible equivalent compiled program is output; such a compiler is fundamentally impossible because it would solve the halting problem.
This may be proven by considering a call to a function, foo(). This function returns nothing and does not have side effects (no I/O, does not modify global variables and “live” data structures, etc.). The fastest possible equivalent program would be simply to eliminate the function call. However, if the function foo() in fact does not return, then the program with the call to foo() would be different from the program without the call; the optimizing compiler will then have to determine this by solving the halting problem.
really good point: why the hell are strings called strings?(07 may 2010)
astrologer emailing crockford about floating-point arithmetic being off, wondering whether his forecasts were now wrong(07 may 2010)
The way to become a good programmer is to have projects that drive you. So build stuff. You'll find you learn very fast when there is something specific you want to do and you don't know how. So you should read books, certainly, but don't just work your way through books.
It doesn't matter super much what language you learn initially. So if you have some friend who is an expert in another language, you might be better off learning that, then switching to Javascript once you know the basics of programming.(06 may 2010)
A memristor is a pipe that changes diameter with the amount and direction of water that flows through it. If water flows through this pipe in one direction, it expands (becoming less resistive). But send the water in the opposite direction and the pipe shrinks (becoming more resistive). Further, the memristor remembers its diameter when water last went through. Turn off the flow and the diameter of the pipe ”freezes” until the water is turned back on. That freezing property suits memristors brilliantly for computer memory. The ability to indefinitely store resistance values means that a memristor can be used as a nonvolatile memory. (High Scalability - High Scalability - How will memristors change everything? )(05 may 2010)
With petabits of persistent storage, colocated CPU and data, configurable numbers of dedicated CPUs, fast on device communication, presumably fast inter-device communication, and slow WAN communication, we have what appears to be the equivalent of a largish cluster in a sugar cube sized device, maybe a data center will fit in the form factor of a brick. (High Scalability - High Scalability - How will memristors change everything? )(05 may 2010)
To scale, Google stores data across an uncountable number of disks using a distributed file system. Their storage problem is solved, but how will Google perform calculations on all that data? They could have a compute grid in which a cluster of CPUs run programs that access records over a distributed file system. This approach brings all that data over the network, which is what we want to avoid. So Google invented MapReduce. What MapReduce does is move computations in the form of code to the nodes where the data is stored. So the “transducers” are running as close as they can to the data stored on disk. Only after the data has been filtered and manipulated does the data cross the network for further processing. (High Scalability - High Scalability - How will memristors change everything? )(05 may 2010)
Today there is rough price parity between (1) one database access, (2) ten bytes of network traffic, (3) 100,000 instructions, (4) 10 bytes of disk storage, and (5) a megabyte of disk bandwidth. This has implications for how one structures Internet-scale distributed computing: one puts computing as close to the data as possible in order to avoid expensive network traffic. (High Scalability - High Scalability - How will memristors change everything? )(05 may 2010)
The kryptonite for large pools of storage is moving chunks of data around fast enough so cooperative work can be done. The performance bottleneck is in the interconnects, when data has to flow over wires. To get around the tyranny of the wire HP is working on an optical backplane using photonic interconnects. Every time a bit has to travel more than a 100 microns it will travel as a pulse of light. Over the next 10 years they project memristors + on chip photonic interconnects will improve the overall computational throughput of a computer system by two orders of magnitude per unit of power, far outpacing what Moore’s law and transistors can accomplish. (High Scalability - High Scalability - How will memristors change everything? )(05 may 2010)
This chain searches for items with the class foo within the first list only and turns their backgrounds red. Then end() returns the object to its state before the call to find(), so the second find() looks for '.bar' inside
, not just inside that list's , and turns the matching elements' backgrounds green. The net result is that items 1 and 3 of the first list have a colored background, and none of the items from the second list do.(05 may 2010)
When the target of the action was itself a good guy, babies preferred the puppet who was nice to it. This alone wasn’t very surprising, given that the other studies found an overall preference among babies for those who act nicely. What was more interesting was what happened when they watched the bad guy being rewarded or punished. Here they chose the punisher. Despite their overall preference for good actors over bad, then, babies are drawn to bad actors when those actors are punishing bad behavior.(05 may 2010)
Currying is actually not very different from what we do when we calculate a function for some given values on a piece of paper.
Take the function f(x,y) = y / x.
To evaluate f(2,3), first, replace x with 2.
Since the result is a new function in y, this function g(y) can be defined as
g(y) = f(2,y) = y / 2.
Next, replacing the y argument with 3, provides the result, g(3) = f(2,3) = 3 / 2.
On paper, using classical notation, it's just that we seem to do it all at the same time. But, in fact, when replacing arguments on a piece of paper, it is done sequentially (i.e.partially). Each replacement results in a function within a function. As we sequentially replace each argument, we are currying the function into simpler and simpler versions of the original. Eventually, we end up with a chain of functions as in lambda calculus, where each function takes only one argument, and multi-argument functions are usually represented in curried form.(04 may 2010)
The phrase is an abbreviation of English proverb, “Speak of the devil and he doth appear.” Deriving from the Middle Ages, this proverb (which was, and to a certain extent still is, rendered as “Talk of the Devil…”) was a superstitious prohibition against speaking directly of the Devil or of evil in general, which was considered to incite that party to appear, generally with unfortunate consequences. Its first printed usage in modern English can be found in Giovanni Torriano’s Piazza Universale (1666), as “The English say, Talk of the Devil, and he’s presently at your elbow.”
The phrase lost its overt message during the 19th century, during which it became a warning against eavesdroppers (“No good of himself does a listener hear,/Speak of the devil he’s sure to appear”), and by the 20th century had taken on its present meaning.
there are some good reasons to believe that cases which actually proceed to filing, trial, or appeal will frequently be underdetermined by the law. Litigants will rarely have an incentive to settle easy cases. For example, in a civil dispute where the law gives a determinate answer to the question of who will win and what the amount of their judgment will be, the parties to litigation will usually prefer to settle, rather than incur the expenses of litigation. Uncertainty about the law is one of the factors that selects which cases will be filed, go to trial, and be appealed. (Legal Theory Lexicon: Legal Theory Lexicon 036: Indeterminacy)(03 may 2010)
nice phrase: If the strong indeterminacy thesis cannot be supported, is there a more modest claim about indeterminacy that is defensible and has critical bite?(03 may 2010)
The notion of a “hard case” can now be explicated with reference to the idea of underdeterminacy. A case is a “hard case” if the outcome is underdetermined by the law in a manner such that the judge must choose among legally acceptable outcomes in a way that changes who will be perceived as the “winner” and who the “loser.” The point is that the outcomes of an case need not be completely indeterminate in order for it to be a hard case; a case in which the results are underdetermined by the law will be “hard” if the legally acceptable variation makes the difference between loss or victory for the litigants. (Legal Theory Lexicon: Legal Theory Lexicon 036: Indeterminacy)(03 may 2010)
The law is determinate with respect to a given case if and only if the set of legally acceptable outcomes contains one and only one member.
The law is underdeterminate with respect to a given case if and only if the set of legally acceptable outcomes is a nonidentical subset of the set of all possible results.
The law is indeterminate with respect to a given case if the set of legally acceptable outcomes is identical with the set of all possible results.
The laws have nothing to do with how cases come out. They are just window dressing that skillful lawyers and judges can manipulate to justify any decision they please.
This counterintuitive position is a version of the claim that law is indeterminate, or what we might call the indeterminacy thesis.
Traditionally China has been the same way: Whenever somebody gives you a glass of water it is always warm so that the receiver knows that it has been boiled, and is safe to drink. It often takes foreigners a while to adjust.(02 may 2010)
talking about how much you work, but in terms of joules(02 may 2010)
Insurers receive premiums upfront and pay claims later. In extreme cases, such as those arising from certain workers’ compensation accidents, payments can stretch over decades. This collect-now, pay-later model leaves us holding large sums – money we call “float” – that will eventually go to others. Meanwhile, we get to invest this float for Berkshire’s benefit. Though individual policies and claims come and go, the amount of float we hold remains remarkably stable in relation to premium volume. Consequently, as our business grows, so does our float.
If premiums exceed the total of expenses and eventual losses, we register an underwriting profit that adds to the investment income produced from the float. This combination allows us to enjoy the use of free money – and, better yet, get paid for holding it. Alas, the hope of this happy result attracts intense competition, so vigorous in most years as to cause the P/C industry as a whole to operate at a significant underwriting loss. This loss, in effect, is what the industry pays to hold its float. Usually this cost is fairly low, but in some catastrophe-ridden years the cost from underwriting losses more than eats up the income derived from use of float.(02 may 2010)
Long ago, Charlie laid out his strongest ambition: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” That bit of wisdom was inspired by Jacobi, the great Prussian mathematician, who counseled “Invert, always invert” as an aid to solving difficult problems. (I can report as well that this inversion approach works on a less lofty level: Sing a country song in reverse, and you will quickly recover your car, house and wife.)(02 may 2010)
the delorian: a newspaper with articles from every age.(01 may 2010)
cheap validation and its relation to the "easy challenge"(01 may 2010)
not being picked for the jury, after a life of not being picked for teams(01 may 2010)
Bert Gordon:
Eddie, is it alright if I get personal?
Bert Gordon:
Sure you got drunk. You have the best excuse in the world for losing; no trouble losing when you got a good excuse. Winning… that can be heavy on your back, too, like a monkey. You’ll drop that load too when you got an excuse. All you gotta do is learn to feel sorry for yourself. One of the best indoor sports, feeling sorry for yourself. A sport enjoyed by all, especially the born losers.
Sweaty and beaming, he bounced with the energy that comes from being still fresh from college — not too many years after he was elected high-school class president with a “Lesser of Two Evils” campaign slogan.(30 apr 2010)
In a valid solution, there is exactly one queen in each row. So it's sufficient to use an int[N] array telling for each row at which column the queen is. This representation is more compact, efficient and easy to use.
Queen conflicts are easier to check:
There can be no horizontal conflicts – there is no way to represent 2 queens in the same row.
There is a vertical conflict if any two columns in the list are equal. (In other words, a valid solution is a permutation of N numbers.)
There is a diagonal conflict if the absolute difference between two columns in the list equals the absolute difference between their positions in the list (i.e. their rows).
Partial solutions with queens only at first M rows (M < N) can be represented by shorter lists.
An alternative to exhaustive search is an 'iterative repair' algorithm, which typically starts with all queens on the board, for example with one queen per column. It then counts the number of conflicts (attacks), and uses a heuristic to determine how to improve the placement of the queens. The 'minimum-conflicts' heuristic — moving the piece with the largest number of conflicts to the square in the same column where the number of conflicts is smallest — is particularly effective: it solves the 1,000,000 queen problem in less than 50 steps on average. This assumes that the initial configuration is 'reasonably good' — if a million queens all start in the same row, it will obviously take at least 999,999 steps to fix it. A 'reasonably good' starting point can for instance be found by putting each queen in its own row and column such that it conflicts with the smallest number of queens already on the board.(30 apr 2010)
Things start to get complicated when you consider their life cycle. Let’s start with a feeding animal living on a lobster’s mouthparts: this individual – it’s hard to assign a sex – can then produce one of three kinds of offspring: a “Pandora” larva, a “Prometheus” larva or a female.
The Pandora larva develops into another feeding adult – a straightforward case of asexual reproduction. By contrast, the female remains inside the adult and awaits a male – but, attentive readers will be crying, what male?
The answer lies in the Prometheus larva. This attaches itself to another feeding adult, then produces two or three males from within itself. These dwarf males, which are even more internally complex than the other stages, seek out the females and fertilise them – though the details are unknown.(30 apr 2010)
the mbta and not being reliably unreliable(30 apr 2010)
what makes certain evolutionary explanations intuitive? i.e, what's the mental process for generating these explanations? something like, “if i were a gene trying to increase my phenotype’s reproductive fitness, what sorts of behaviors would i encourage?”, making sure if we can that these behaviors aren’t so complicated, because that would make the story less plausible.(30 apr 2010)
"and what we have here are gesticulations"(30 apr 2010)
you really don’t want a sitting politician — least of all a president — giving your commencement speech. Obama in particular has subpar delivery…
what you want is a writer, or actor, or comedian, or someone from the edge of society with an incredible story.(29 apr 2010)
not “do you come here often?”, but “how often do you come here?”, real intently, like a census-taker(29 apr 2010)
In the countries on the left, when citizens go to the DMV to get their driver’s licenses, a form they fill out says: “Check the box below if you want to participate in the organ donor program.” In those countries, most people don’t check the box, and so they don’t join the program.
Meanwhile, driver’s license applications in the countries on the right have a box with the words “Check the box below if you don’t want to participate in the organ donor program.” No one there checks the box either - so everyone joins!
Dan Ariely, the behavioral economist who discusses this matter in a brilliant TED talk, explains that this universal inaction isn’t because we don’t care about the decision of whether or not to become organ donors. Rather, he says, “It’s because we care. It’s difficult and it’s complex, and it’s so complex that we don’t know what to do. And because we have no idea what to do, we just pick whatever it was that was chosen for us.”
Face-to-face bargaining resulting in a written and signed agreement is the paradigm of a contract and also represents a paradigmatically voluntary transaction. Battery—an unconsented-to, harmful touching—represents both a clear instance of tort law and clearly involuntary transaction. But the thesis that the law is a seamless web is not inconsistent with there being paradigm cases of conceptually distinct doctrinal fields. Rather, the idea is that these paradigm cases blend into one another through a series of small and barely noticeable steps—so that there is no sharp boundary, no “seam,” between tort and contract. For example, first year law students quickly learn that not all of contract law involves agreement or bargain. “Quasi-contract” and reliance-based liability involve transactions that are involuntary or at least not fully voluntary, and this cluster of doctrine is neither clearly tort nor clearly contract. One interpretation of the seamless web metaphor is that it asserts that the law is always or almost always like that—the organizing principles of various rules fade gradually into one another, and hence, there are no sharp boundaries in the web of the law. We might say that this first interpretation of the seamless web metaphor is ontological: “law is a seamless web” could be an assertion about the nature of doctrinal categories—they are interconnected and not isolated.(26 apr 2010)
F.W. Maitland, the famous legal historian wrote, “Such is the unity of all history that any one who endeavors to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web.” (A Prologue to a History of English Law, 14L. Qtrly Rev. 13 (1898(26 apr 2010)
(3) I don’t think anyone who’s in favor of “exploratory” math is also against drilling fundamentals. At least I’m not. I’m fairly convinced that to be actually good at anything requires a great deal of sustained deliberate practice, much of which will end up being fairly tedious. If you ask world-class violinists to name their least favorite activities, #1 will be “daily practice” and #2 will be “lessons with a coach.” (See the paper referenced at jsomers.net/blog/deliberate-practice.)
The trick is to get kids to see the value of that tedium, and the way to do it, I think, is to give them really good problems to chew on, fast feedback about their progress, lots of incremental goals, and encouragement. They’ll end up volunteering for slog after slog.(25 apr 2010)
Since Justice Stevens announced his intention to retire, discussions about what his departure will mean for the Court have regularly noted his military service in World War II. The justice enlisted the day before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor (and has joked about how the enemy responded to the news immediately).(25 apr 2010)
not liking baseball for the same reason that I fell asleep listening to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra — my mind isn't keyed into the details, so it never engages.(25 apr 2010)
This is really a fantastically important principle. When we put into perspective what modern machines should be capable of, it’s really quite disappointing what they end up doing.
Recently I was arguing with one of my company’s engineers when I noticed that selecting a few tens of thousands of things on-screen took 1-2 seconds. He responded that there’s a lot going on there. I responded that I’m selecting a few tens of thousands of things on-screen on a machine that’s capable of billions of CPU operations per second and trillions if I count in the GPU. What I’m doing isn’t even a rounding error when compared against those staggering numbers. It should be so fast that those things are selected before I even move my finger from the mouse button. But it’s not, I can actually count seconds before something happens…and I know that we aren’t doing billions of things in the meantime.
All this talk of canvas demo this, and browser app that fails to bring into focus that the things we are fawning over, simple graphics and interactivity on a postcard sized rendering window running on a multi-core multi-GIGAHERTZ machine with assisting co-processors for everything from floating point to window rendering, doing things that we were all doing on machines with dozens of Mhz not even 15 years ago, obviates how tall the software stack is between the hardware and the user.
It’s not that my engineer’s code was bad, far from it, it’s just that it was lazy. He was relying on libraries built on top of libraries built on top of libraries on down the line. Basically it’s turtles all the way down, and we’re all building on top of that giant turtle pile when we could be tearing away at relativistic speeds around a pulsar.
“We have a lot of designers here, and when they’re trying to draw or do something creative, I start hearing the desks go up,” she said.(22 apr 2010)
The term “stigmergy” was introduced by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé in 1959 to refer to termite behavior. He defined it as: “Stimulation of workers by the performance they have achieved.” It is derived from the Greek words stigma (mark, sign) and ergon (work, action), and captures the notion that an agent’s actions leave signs in the environment, signs that it and other agents sense and that determine and incite their subsequent actions [1]. (Stigmergy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(21 apr 2010)
In all these stories, the first party wants to credibly pre-commit to a rule, but also has incentives to forgive other people’s deviations from the rule. The second party breaks the rules, but comes up with an excuse for why its infraction should be forgiven.
The first party’s response is based not only on whether the person’s excuse is believable, not even on whether the person’s excuse is morally valid, but on whether the excuse can be accepted without straining the credibility of their previous pre-commitment.
The general principle is that by accepting an excuse, a rule-maker is also committing themselves to accepting all equally good excuses in the future. There are some exceptions - accepting an excuse in private but making sure no one else ever knows, accepting an excuse once with the express condition that you will never accept any other excuses - but to some degree these are devil’s bargains, as anyone who can predict you will do this can take advantage of you.
skim should automatically launch a text box with my excerpts when i close the document(21 apr 2010)
allelomimetic communication (my action influences the future actionsof others)(21 apr 2010)
The original concept of Tumbolia was invented by Douglas Hofstadter,
cognitive science professor, and author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal
Golden Braid. In 2009, I sent him an email asking for etymology information, and
this was his response:
As for the origins of the name, all I know is that it came to me easily and
instinctively. Exactly how or when, I don’t recall. Of course the idea behind
the name is partly that one is tumbling in space, or rather in limbo, flipping
end over end, spinning forever in an aimless fashion, getting nowhere. And of
course the word “limbo” is found inside “Tumbolia.” I wish I could inform you
better about the word’s origins, but that’s all that comes to mind right now.
There may have been some other unconscious influences operating on me — indeed,
surely there were! — but I can’t seem to get at them.
As for the idea of Tumbolia, as opposed to its name, well, I recall at some
point making the joke (which I think is found in the Six-Part Ricercar) that when your hiccups go away, they
don’t completely cease existing, but instead they go into Tumbolia — so that
Tumbolia would be a kind of hyperspace, some kind of hidden “pocket” in the
fabric of the universe into which things can vanish, and from which they can
perhaps pop back out — a kind of blurry holding zone for evanescent phenomena.
There is a certain class of software that sounds easy but is actually insanely difficult. I call it “garden path software.” (WrongRoom [dive into mark])(20 apr 2010)
Tafting is the act of excitedly clicking link after link in Wikipedia until you find you’re a million topics away from where you started. It was named by Daniel Biddle after this cartoon:
Writing webpages and poems is a bore, or rather is hard, unless there’s a good taft subject behind them. I was wondering if there were ways to get into tafting more easily. The best idea I had so far was to monitor my browsing history for long Wikipedia taft chains, and then extract the first and last URIs from each chain.
The idea is that the first in the chain was what started the taft in the first place, so it might be a reusable seed taftpoint. The idea of using the last in the chain is that perhaps I was interrupted or distracted at that point, and that it would be a good point to pick up again.
One recent taft chain that I remember was looking at the history of the alphabet, which sort of led to an investigation of the history of writing in general. I don’t actually remember well how it started or how it ended, but I remember the stuff in the middle pretty well, especially the stuff about Sumerian.
Here’s an analogy that I hope will shed some light on what the Fundamental Theorem is, and why it’s so helpful. (My colleague Charlie Peskin at NYU suggested it.) Imagine a staircase. The total change in height from the top to the bottom is the sum of the rises of all the steps in between. That’s true even if some of them rise more than others, and no matter how many steps there are.
The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus says something similar for functions — if you integrate the derivative of a function from one point to another, you get the net change in the function between the two points. In this analogy, the function is like the elevation of each step compared to ground level. The rises of individual steps are like the derivative. Integrating the derivative is like summing the rises. And the two points are the top and the bottom.
Why is this so helpful? Suppose you’re given an enormous list of numbers to sum, as occurs whenever you’re calculating an integral by slices. If you can somehow manage to find the corresponding staircase — in other words, if you can find an elevation function for which those numbers are the rises — then computing the integral would be a snap. It’s just the top minus the bottom.
That’s the great speed-up made possible by the Fundamental Theorem. And it’s why we torture all beginning calculus students with months of learning how to find elevation functions, technically called “antiderivatives.” (It Slices, It Dices - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com)(19 apr 2010)
It’s interesting that Archimedes viewed his mechanical method as a means for discovering theorems rather than proving them. As he put it, “… certain things first became clear to me by a mechanical method, although they had to be demonstrated by geometry afterwards because their investigation by the said method did not furnish an actual demonstration. But it is of course easier, when we have previously acquired, by the method, some knowledge of the questions, to supply the proof than it is to find it without any previous knowledge.”
That last line offers a timeless lesson about problem solving — when you’re trying to prove something, it helps to know it’s true. (It Slices, It Dices - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com)(19 apr 2010)
homer at the movies: "who's that guy?"… "what'd that guy say when i said 'who's that guy?'?"(19 apr 2010)
Yogi Berra's famous quote: "No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded."(19 apr 2010)
"think the world through someone else's mind"(19 apr 2010)
the consequences of being able to constantly record speech and transcribe it to text in real time. think annotations, science, privacy; think of the conversational equivalent of highly targeted keyword searches (what two guys in Arizona are saying about "X"); think advertising, media, etc.; think of the law; the bubbling up of ideas and jokes and people.(19 apr 2010)
Standard introductions to complexity theory include Hopcroft and Ullman (Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation), Sipser (Introduction to Theory of Computation) and Garey and Johnson (Computers and Intractability). Also highly recommended as background is Aho and Ullman (The Theory of Parsing, Translation and Compiling, volume 1) for a broad introduction to formal languages. For more information on unsolvability read the collection of papers The Undecidable (Davis, editor) and for a superb review of the unsolvability of the Diophantine decision problem read Davis’s Computers and Unsolvability. This last is fascinating for any computer scientist with a mathematical inclination, as it presents a complete proof of one of the most important mathematical results of the 20th century in a form accessible to a dedicated CS undergraduate. (Further Info)(18 apr 2010)
Airlines dynamically adjust their responses to seat availability queries as they estimate demand for flights. The simplest case is for the most expensive fares. For example, months before a flight leaves all (first class) F seats will be available but as seats are reserved the counts slowly drops until the plane is full; similarly for the most expensive coach class booking code, Y.
But cheaper coach class booking codes like H have response profiles that reflect demand as well as capacity. Suppose the airline sees very high demand for this flight relative to similar flights in the past. They may decide to stop selling cheaper seats so as to force passengers to pay more, or viewed another way, so as to save seats for those who would pay more. Some cheap booking codes might not normally be available at all, and might only be enabled in very low demand situations. Importantly, the information the airline uses to estimate demand changes constantly, so seat availability responses may fluctuate up and down even in absence of any reservations.
One of the biggest problems for the airline is predicting demand. They devote huge efforts to “cleaning” historical data for use in training statistical demand models. Imagine trying to accurately predict demand immediately after a strike, or a plane crash, or for flights to the city hosting the Olympics. (Availability Dynamics)(18 apr 2010)
Airline seat availability is much more complicated than just the question of whether the number of reserved seats equals the capacity of an aircraft. Airlines use seat availability as a way to dynamically adjust prices according to demand. Simplifying somewhat, each published fare is assigned a letter of the alphabet called a booking code, typically also the first letter of the fare’s basis code. The airline chooses the booking code for a fare based primarily on the fare’s cabin (coach, business or first) and the fare’s price.
Asked whether there are any seats available on a plane, the response an airline gives is not “yes” or “no” but rather a per-booking-code vector of seat counts. For example, in the figure the first flight has 1F booking code and 4H booking codes available; the second has no F’s and 3H’s. To fly on these two flights using the H14ESNR fare (with booking code H), H seats must be available for both flights. They are, and up to 3 people could buy H fares, but a (cheaper) fare with booking code Q could not be used because no Q seats are available for the first flight.
Airlines do not usually publish seat counts higher than 9, so even when a plane is empty it is common to see F9 Y9 B9… (Seat Availability)(18 apr 2010)
Why this mess? Why so many fares, such complicated rules, the logic of priceable units, and so on? The answer is often called variable pricing. Various airline economists make the following claim: there is no price such that the price times the demand at the price equals the cost of flying a large jet. There are a lot of technical issues that can be raised with their argument, but leaving those aside the argument is that if the airline charges $1 per ticket of course the plane will fill, but the total revenue of $150 barely pays for an hour of a pilot’s salary. If they charge $1000 a ticket then if they could fill the plane they’d make a fortune, but only a small number of people are willing to fly at that price, so again they can’t equal the fixed costs of flying a plane. But if the airline can make those who are willing to pay it pay $1000, and others pay $800, and others $500, maybe down to $100 or so, then the sum total over all passengers is sufficient to pay for the fixed costs. In fact, some estimates put the incremental cost of flying a single passenger as low as $30 (for the meal and baggage and ticket handling), so that once the airline has committed to flying the plane it is in their interest to sell a ticket for $30 rather than let a seat go empty. But they must keep those who can pay more from buying their ticket at low prices, a tough balancing act.
The airlines solve this problem in two ways, collectively called revenue management. The first is to use fare prices and fare rules to construct a system wherein the cheapest fares have restrictions that increase their perceived cost for a business traveler to the point where the business traveler will choose to buy more expensive fares. For example, cheap fares require round trip travel, prohibit non stop flights and ticket refunds, et cetera. But the cheap fares remain available for leisure travelers with more flexibility, for whom the extra restrictions are not so onerous. The second way, discussed later, consists of dynamically deciding whether to sell a given fare for a flight based on how much demand there is for the flight. For example, if a flight is not filling, lower priced fares are made available (on the grounds that it’s better to get some money than none) but on high-demand flights only the most expensive fares are available. (Why this mess? Variable pricing)(18 apr 2010)
Fare rules are expressed in an extremely complicated and baroque electronic language, built from hundreds of parameterized predicates joined by sometimes bizarre logical combinators. Although the language has to be very big to express all of the many airlines’ restrictions, the language is not nearly as expressive as a general purpose programming language. There are no functions, variables, quantifiers, scoping operators, iterators, etc. A non-profit company, ATP (Airline Tariff Publishing), owned jointly by many airlines, manages and distributes fares and rules electronically and working jointly with airlines and search companies defines the electronic representations. (Sample Fare Rules)(18 apr 2010)
One part of the fare’s rules is known as the routing. The routing is a directed graph of permitted routes within the fare component. For example, the H14ESNR fare permits non-stop travel between BOS and SFO, but also permits stops in NYC, CHI, DFW and LAX (but not in both DFW and CHI). Thus, the price is the same, $436.28, whether one takes one flight or four, despite the wildly different cost to the airline of providing the service. In fact, since many of the cheapest fares on popular business routes prohibit non-stop travel, it is commonly the case that airlines’ prices and expenses are anti-correlated, something to think about when you read about airline bankruptcy filings! (Sample Fare Rules)(18 apr 2010)
Fare rules can restrict most any aspect of a journey. Often they restrict the passengers who may use the fare – limiting special discounts to children, for example — and the travel agents who may sell the fare. Many fares include restrictions on the flight numbers, locations and departure times of flights within the fare’s fare component. Typically fares within the United States prohibit stops of longer than 4 hours within a FC. Fare rules may also impose restrictions at the priceable unit domain, such as the Saturday night stay restriction that depends on the times of flights from the first and last FC in the fare’s PU simultaneously. Rules very often restrict the fares that can combine in a priceable unit, such as requiring them to be on the same airline or have similar fare basis codes.
It is even possible for a fare to restrict parts of the journey outside the fare’s priceable unit. As will be shown, this greatly increases the difficulty of the search problem.
One passenger’s fares may restrict another’s, such as cheap companion fares that force a second or third passenger to accompany the first, and that restrict the fares those passengers may use to pay for common flights. This can cause an exponential increase in the complexity of search with the number of passengers on the trip. (Fare Rules)(18 apr 2010)
Amazingly, the graph diameter is often as high as 20: there are airports that can take 20 flights minimum to get between, over 4 days (typically this will be a small airport in Alaska or Canada to another small airport in Africa or Indonesia). (The Flight Network)(18 apr 2010)
there are 30m scheduled commercial flights per year, or one per second. At any time there are 4-10k flights in the air.(18 apr 2010)
Flight data is updated daily or occasionally more frequently in the case of unexpected cancellations. Prices are updated about ten times a day, and seat availability continuously. (Air Travel Planning)(18 apr 2010)
…and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.(18 apr 2010)
affirms his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro- and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void(18 apr 2010)
the absurd "pictorial arguments" between n and jc(18 apr 2010)
Smithers: May I ask how you spent your weekend?… Burns: Well, a bit overly familiar, but I'll allow it…(16 apr 2010)
bartlet's chess teacher being stabbed to death on the wharf for honorably stepping in to defend a woman… as an especially engineered kind of cheese, per #4 at jsomers.net/blog/critical-tidbits.(16 apr 2010)
these fragments i have shored against my ruin(16 apr 2010)
what if humans shed skins once every n years?(15 apr 2010)
there should be a goddamn tv show called "practice"(15 apr 2010)
"hey buddy you get a haircut?, it looks awful"(15 apr 2010)
Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. (David Foster Wallace on Life and Work - WSJ.com)(14 apr 2010)
"…you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you."(14 apr 2010)
Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you’re “supposed to” think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it’s hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you’re like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat-out won’t want to. But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line — maybe she’s not usually like this; maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who’s dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible — it just depends on what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important — if you want to operate on your default-setting — then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. (David Foster Wallace on Life and Work - WSJ.com)(14 apr 2010)
By way of example, let’s say it’s an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired, and you’re stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home — you haven’t had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job — and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the workday, and the traffic’s very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store’s hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can’t just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store’s crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough checkout lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can’t take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.
Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn’t fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I’ve worked really hard all day and I’m starved and tired and I can’t even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid g-d- people.
Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth…
Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do — except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn’t have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It’s the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to rush to the hospital, and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am — it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.(14 apr 2010)
And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.(14 apr 2010)
reading circles: interleaving annotated excerpts among members of a group.
(shared document, intersection of highlighted passages?)(12 apr 2010)
During the drive phase, Bolt and the rest of the runners are all leaning forward at an unsustainable tilt, their torsos out ahead of where their feet impact the ground. They are basically in the act of falling down, face-first, but their legs, racing against gravity, are preventing that from happening, propelling them forward so hard and so fast that their bodies, instead of face-planting, begin to slowly rise up into a full upright position. Sprinters often describe this phase, when everything happens correctly, as being analogous to liftoff in an airplane.(12 apr 2010)
Yet for most of our history, they also did little harm. When a work ended its commercial life, there was no copyright-related use that would be inhibited by an exclusive right. When a book went out of print, you could not buy it from a publisher. But you could still buy it from a used bookstore, and when a used bookstore sells it, at least in the United States, there is no need to pay the copyright owner anything. Thus, the ordinary use of a book after its commercial life ended was a use that was independent of copyright law. The same was effectively true of film. Because the costs of restoring a film—the real economic costs, not the attorneys’ fees—were so high, it was never at all feasible to preserve or restore film.
Digital technologies have changed that. It is now possible to preserve and offer access to all sorts of knowledge. Digital technologies give new life to copyrighted material after it passes out of its commercial life.
And now copyright law does get in the way. Every step of producing this digital archive of our culture infringes on the exclusive right of copyright. To digitize a book is to copy it. To do that requires permission of the copyright owner. The same holds for music, film, and every other artifact of our culture protected by copyright. The effort to make these things available to history, or to researchers, or to those who just want to explore is now inhibited by a set of rules that were written for a radically different context.
the fact that bathrooms are often aligned vertically in a building as a paragon of practical knowledge(12 apr 2010)
SPELKE: I’m glad you brought up the case of the basketball and baseball players. I think it’s interesting to ask, what distinguishes these cases, where you remove the overt discrimination and within a very short period of time the differential disappears, from other cases, where you remove the overt discrimination and the covert discrimination continues? In the athletic cases where discrimination disappears quickly, there are clear, objective measures of success. Whatever people think about the capacities of a black player, if he is hitting the ball out of the park, he is going to get credit for a home run. That is not the case in science.
In science, the judgments are subjective, every step of the way. Who’s really talented? Who deserves bigger lab space? Who should get the next fellowship? Who should get promoted to tenure? These decisions are not based on clear and objective criteria. These are the cases where you see discrimination persisting. You see it in academia. You see it in Claudia Goldin’s studies of orchestra auditions, which also involve subtle judgments: Who’s the more emotive, sensitive player? If you know that the players are male or female, you’re going pick mostly men, but if the players are behind a screen, you’ll start picking more women.
PINKER: But that makes the wrong prediction: the harder the science, the greater the participation of women! We find exactly the opposite: it’s the most subjective fields within academia — the social sciences, the humanities, the helping professions — that have the greatest representation of women.
This follows exactly from the choices that women express in what gives them satisfaction in life. But it goes in the opposite direction to the prediction you made about the role of objective criteria in bringing about gender equity. Surely it’s physics, and not, say, sociology, that has the more objective criteria for success. (Edge: THE SCIENCE OF GENDER AND SCIENCE)(11 apr 2010)
But the question on the table is not, Are there biological sex differences? The question is, Why are there fewer women mathematicians and scientists? The patterns of bias that I described provide four interconnected answers to that question. First, and most obviously, biased perceptions produce discrimination: When a group of equally qualified men and women are evaluated for jobs, more of the men will get those jobs if they are perceived to be more qualified. Second, if people are rational, more men than women will put themselves forward into the academic competition, because men will see that they’ve got a better chance for success. Academic jobs will be more attractive to men because they face better odds, will get more resources, and so forth.
Third, biased perceptions earlier in life may well deter some female students from even attempting a career in science or mathematics. If your parents feel that you don’t have as much natural talent as someone else whose objective abilities are no better than yours, that may discourage you, as Eccles’s work shows. Finally, there’s likely to be a snowball effect. All of us have an easier time imagining ourselves in careers where there are other people like us. If the first three effects perpetuate a situation where there are few female scientists and mathematicians, young girls will be less likely to see math and science as a possible life. (Edge: THE SCIENCE OF GENDER AND SCIENCE)(11 apr 2010)
I will give you one last version of a gender-labeling study. This one hits particularly close to home. The subjects in the study were people like Steve and me: professors of psychology, who were sent some vitas to evaluate as applicants for a tenure track position. Two different vitas were used in the study. One was a vita of a walk-on-water candidate, best candidate you’ve ever seen, you would die to have this person on your faculty. The other vita was a middling, average vita among successful candidates. For half the professors, the name on the vita was male, for the other half the name was female. People were asked a series of questions: What do you think about this candidate’s research productivity? What do you think about his or her teaching experience? And finally, Would you hire this candidate at your university?
For the walk-on-water candidate, there was no effect of gender labeling on these judgments. I think this finding supports Steve’s view that we’re dealing with little overt discrimination at universities. It’s not as if professors see a female name on a vita and think, I don’t want her. When the vita’s great, everybody says great, let’s hire.
What about the average successful vita, though: that is to say, the kind of vita that professors most often must evaluate? In that case, there were differences. The male was rated as having higher research productivity. These psychologists, Steve’s and my colleagues, looked at the same number of publications and thought, “good productivity” when the name was male, and “less good productivity” when the name was female. Same thing for teaching experience. The very same list of courses was seen as good teaching experience when the name was male, and less good teaching experience when the name was female. In answer to the question would they hire the candidate, 70% said yes for the male, 45% for the female. If the decision were made by majority rule, the male would get hired and the female would not. (Edge: THE SCIENCE OF GENDER AND SCIENCE)(11 apr 2010)
the question, "do you miss college?", as incredibly informative(11 apr 2010)
conspecific: an organism belonging to the same species as another organism(11 apr 2010)
obsidian: a type of dark rock that looks like glass and comes from volcanoes(11 apr 2010)
"imprecation" and the funny pronounciation of "implication"(11 apr 2010)
what if books had URLs, or chapters, or even paragraphs? the web was designed this way (think resources and REST), and notes, feeds, cross-streams, citations, excerpts, etc., would be so much easier. fuck!(11 apr 2010)
“I blew out my knee”… “Who’s out-my-knee?”(10 apr 2010)
In the real world, ants (initially) wander randomly, and upon finding food return to their colony while laying down pheromone trails. If other ants find such a path, they are likely not to keep travelling at random, but to instead follow the trail, returning and reinforcing it if they eventually find food (see Ant communication).
Over time, however, the pheromone trail starts to evaporate, thus reducing its attractive strength. The more time it takes for an ant to travel down the path and back again, the more time the pheromones have to evaporate. A short path, by comparison, gets marched over faster, and thus the pheromone density remains high as it is laid on the path as fast as it can evaporate. Pheromone evaporation has also the advantage of avoiding the convergence to a locally optimal solution. If there were no evaporation at all, the paths chosen by the first ants would tend to be excessively attractive to the following ones. In that case, the exploration of the solution space would be constrained.
Thus, when one ant finds a good (i.e., short) path from the colony to a food source, other ants are more likely to follow that path, and positive feedback eventually leads all the ants following a single path. The idea of the ant colony algorithm is to mimic this behavior with “simulated ants” walking around the graph representing the problem to solve.
rooting for tiger today is like a very sort of childish wanting-it-back-the-way-it-was?(10 apr 2010)
what if your brain literally sprouted mold and fungus when you failed to think in a certain way?(10 apr 2010)
Consider again that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
what's the average number of dupes for names in new york?(10 apr 2010)
I once picked up a hitchhiker who claimed to be the former director for a Canadian national history museum, in Ottawa or something. His specialty was in South American indigenous tribes so, distraught after divorcing his wife, he sold most of his belongings, quit his position, and went to go live with them for a year.
The tribe he ended up with has some strange rituals born from necessity. For example, they are in almost constant transit across the Andes year-round in order to find food. They purposely drop seeds along the way so that the plants will be ready for harvest on the way back, later in the season. One of these plants produces a nut that is mostly indigestible when a person first eats it. So they eat it anyway, harvest the partially digested nut from their feces, wash it off, and eat it again. It fully digests the second time through.
Anyway, the trek across the Andes is so arduous that pregnant women cannot make it. They will almost certainly die. This means that the men have only a two month window to mate with their wives so that the later stages of pregnancy will coincide with times of less physical stress. That also means that for the other 10 months of the year, in order to prevent the men from sleeping with the women, the genders separate into two different tribes — one male and one female — that stay away from each other as much as possible. And the men, in order to cure their sexual lust, simply sleep with each other.
So, the men of the tribe are gay for ten months of the year.
the point in a show where enough of the characters is known to basically supply material for arbitrary future episodes.(08 apr 2010)
what is it with the bbs and css of the world and the wire?(08 apr 2010)
the ladder might be becoming more and more plausible thanks to these dating sites(07 apr 2010)
"…and if you disrespect him in my presence again, I will rededicate the rest of my life to ruining the rest of yours."(06 apr 2010)
what is it that's so appealing about intellectualizing low culture, cartoons, etc., and does roland barthes have anything to do with it?(06 apr 2010)
Do you want to know the only real purpose [consciousness] serves? Training wheels. You can’t see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That’s a pretty half-assed way to parse reality.(06 apr 2010)
Gutenberg greatly improved the process by treating typesetting and printing as two separate work steps. A goldsmith by profession, he created his type pieces from a lead-based alloy which suited printing purposes so well that it is still used today.[20] The mass production of metal letters was achieved by his key invention of a special hand mould, the matrix.[21] The Latin alphabet proved to be an enormous advantage in the process since it allowed the type-setter to represent any text with the use of only ca. two dozen different letters.[22]
Another factor conducive to printing lay in the book existing in the format of the codex, which had originated in the Roman period.[23] Considered the most important advance in the history of the book prior to printing itself, the codex had completely replaced the ancientscroll at the onset of the Middle Ages (500 AD).[24] The codex holds considerable practical advantages over the scroll format; it is more convenient to read (by turning pages), is more compact, less costly, and, in particular, unlike the scroll, both recto and verso could be used for writing − and printing.[25]
If the operator did not assemble enough characters, the line will not justify correctly: even with the spacebands expanded all the way, the matrices are not tight. A safety mechanism in the justification vise detects this and blocks the casting operation. Without such a mechanism, the result would be a squirt of molten type metal spraying out through the gaps between the matrices, creating a time consuming mess and a possible hazard to the operator.[11] If a squirt did occur, it was generally up to the operator to grab the hell bucket and catch the flowing lead. It was so called because the bucket would often “go to hell”, or melt, while holding the molten lead that was still extremely hot. Also, in conjunction with possible hazards facing an operator, toxic lead fumes should be noted as they were the result of melting the lead ingots for casting. (Linotype machine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(03 apr 2010)
The first two columns of keys are: e, t, a, o, i, n; and s, h, r, d, l, u. A Linotype operator would often deal with a typing error by running the fingers down these two rows, thus filling out the line with the nonsense words etaoin shrdlu. This is known as a run down. It is often quicker to cast a bad slug than to hand-correct the line within the assembler. The slug with the run down is removed once it has been cast, or by the proofreader.
Danny, every morning I leave an acre and a half of the most beautiful property in New Canaan, get on a train and come to work in a 54-storey glass highrise. In between I step over bodies to get here, 20, 30, 50 of them a day. So as I'm stepping over them, I reach into my pocket and give them whatever I've got.
You're not afraid they're going to spend it on booze?
I'm hoping they're gonna spend it on booze. These people, for most of them it's not like they're one hot meal from turning it around. For most of them, the clock's pretty much run out. They'll be home soon enough. What's wrong with giving them a little novocaine to get them through the night?(03 apr 2010)
yelp reviews placing a premium on authenticity(03 apr 2010)
g saying he wants everybody to like him. I want exactly half of the people to like me.(03 apr 2010)
My patience for the line, “It is digital. It either works or it doesn’t” ended a long time ago.
“Digital” signals are analog signals, but the only difference is that they are restricted to being above or below some threshold. But around that threshold there is a gray area where you can’t really tell whether your signal will be interpreted as 1 or 0.(31 mar 2010)
Excerpts from C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity:
Now this objection is in one sense very right, very charitable, very spiritual, very sensitive. It has every available quality except that of being useful.
—
These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.
—
[http://jsomers.net/fear-trembling.html]
—
Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know. And because of that, we know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try, and which they know they ought to obey. Notice the following point. Anyone studying Man from the outside as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing our language and consequently not able to get any inside knowledge from us, but merely observing what we did, would never get the slightest evidence that we had this moral law. How could he? for his observations would only show what we did, and the moral law is about what we ought to do. In the same way, if there were anything above or behind the observed facts in the case of stones or the weather, we, by studying them from outside, could never hope to discover it.
The position of the question, then, is like this. We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it. There is only one case in which we can know whether there is anything more, namely our own case. And in that one case we find there is. Or put it the other way round. If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe — no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely this ought to arouse our suspicions? In the only case where you can expect to get an answer, the answer turns out to be Yes; and in the other cases, where you do not get an answer, you see why you do not. Suppose someone asked me, when I see a man in blue uniform going down the street leaving little paper packets at each house, why I suppose that they contain letters? I should reply, ‘Because whenever he leaves a similar little packet for me I find it does contain a letter.’ And if he then objected—‘But you’ve never seen all these letters which you think the other people are getting,; I should say, ‘Of course not, and I shouldn’t expect to, because they’re not addressed to me. I’m explaining the packets I’m not allowed to open by the ones I am allowed to open’ It is the same about this question. The only packet I am allowed to open is Man. When I do, especially when I open that particular man called Myself, I find that I do not exist on my own, that I am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to have in a certain way. I do not, of course , think that if I could get inside a stone or a tree I should find exactly the same thing, just as I do not think all the other people in the street get the same letters as I do. I should expect, for instance, to find that the stone had to obey the law of gravity — that whereas the sender of the letters merely tells me to obey the law of my human nature, he compels the stone to obey the laws of its stony nature. But I should expect to find that there was, so to speak, a sender of letters in both cases, a Power behind the facts, a Director, a Guide.
—
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. what was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too — for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist — in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless — I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality — namely my idea of justice — was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.
—
Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect. For instance, when you have grasped that the earth and the other planets all go round the sun, you would naturally expect that all the planets were made to match — all at equal distances from each other, say, or distances that regularly increased, or all the same size, or else getting bigger or smaller as you go further from the sun. In fact, you find no rhyme or reason (that we can see) about either the sizes or the distances; and some of them have one moon, one has four, one has two, some have none, and one has a ring.
—
What is the problem? A universe that contains much that is obviously bad and apparently meaningless, but containing creatures like ourselves who know that it is bad and meaningless. There are only two views that face all the facts. one is the Christian view that this is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. The other is the view called dualism. Dualism means the belief that there are two equal and independent powers that the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war. I personally think that next to Christianity Dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed on the market. But it has a catch in it.
—
But the moment you say that, you are putting into the universe a third thing in addition to the two Powers: some law or standard or rule of good which one of the powers conforms to and the other fails to conform to. But since the two powers are judged by this standard, then this standard, or the Being who made this standard, is farther back and higher up than either of them, and He will be the real God. In fact, what we meant by calling them good and bad turns out to be that one of them is in a right relation to the real ultimate God and the other in a wrong relation to Him.
—
Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Whey, then, did god give them free will? Because free will, thought it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata — of creatures that worked like machines — would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for his higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.
—
One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to. I mea the claim to forgive sins: any sins. Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself. You tread on my toes and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.
Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He is ‘humble and meek’ and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings.
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
—
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed.
—
Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death.
—
The perfect submission, the perfect suffering, the perfect death were no only easier to Jesus because He was God, but were possible only because He was God. but surely that is a very odd reason for not accepting them? The teacher is able to form the letters for the child because the teacher is grown-up and knows how to write. That, of course, makes it easier for the teacher; and only because it is easier for him can he help the child. If it rejected him because it’s easy for grown-ups; and waited to learn writing from another child who could not write itself (and so had no ‘unfair’ advantage), it would not get on very quickly.
—
A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and being over again after each stumble—-because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.
—
But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. he does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.
And let me make it quite clear that when Christians say the Chris-life is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral. When they speak of being ‘in Christ’ or of Christ being ‘in them’, this is not simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying Him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts — that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of his body. And perhaps that explains one or two things. It explains why this new life is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and Holy Communion. It is not merely the spreading of an idea; it is more like evolution—-a biological or superbiological fact. There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.
—
Another possible objection is this. Why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it that He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely. I do not suppose you and I would have thought much of a Frenchman who waited till the Allies were marching into Germany and then announced he was on our side. God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else — something it never entered your head to conceive — comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.(31 mar 2010)
I have been afraid for you sometimes, because success sings a deadly lullaby to most people. Success is a real and subtle whore, who would like nothing better than to catch you sleeping and bite your cock off.(27 mar 2010)
REMEMBER YOU ARE WRITING FOR A VISUAL MEDIUM. MOSTTELEVISION WRITING, OURS INCLUDED, SOUNDS LIKE RADIO. THE CAMERACAN DO THE EXPLAINING FOR YOU. LETIT. WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERS DOING -*LITERALLY*. WHAT ARE THEY HANDLING, WHAT ARE THEY READING. WHAT ARE THEY WATCHING ON TELEVISION, WHAT ARE THEY SEEING.
IF YOU PRETEND THE CHARACTERS CANT SPEAK, AND WRITE A SILENT MOVIE, YOU WILL BE WRITING GREAT DRAMA.
IF YOU DEPRIVE YOURSELF OF THE CRUTCH OF NARRATION, EXPOSITION,INDEED, OF SPEECH. YOU WILL BE FORGED TO WORK IN A NEW MEDIUM - TELLING THE STORY IN PICTURES (ALSO KNOWN AS SCREENWRITING)
THIS IS A NEW SKILL. NO ONE DOES IT NATURALLY. YOU CAN TRAIN YOURSELVES TO DO IT, BUT YOU NEED TO START.
on the wire: it is clearly a good show, and very detailed and carefully written, but just not very entertaining (i've watched seasons 1, 2, half of 3, and some of 4). or put another way: i never feel better for having watched it. compare the west wing, 24, or any comedy.(25 mar 2010)
when a pe problem has extraordinarily large numbers or at first glance seems intractable, that’s usually a good sign that there’s a trick involved, or at least a tight mathematical pattern. Compare problems that are open-ended.(25 mar 2010)
reasoning about the anthropic principle(25 mar 2010)
write up (blog?) why i dislike the big bang theory? maybe add some "wire" thoughts in there?(24 mar 2010)
"spitting writtens" (in what's supposed to be a freestyle)(23 mar 2010)
William Gibson once said that “the future is already here, it just isn’t widely distributed yet.”(23 mar 2010)
All I really have to say about life is that for it to be regarded as valuable, it has to first be regarded as grievable. A life that is in some sense socially dead or already “lost” cannot be grieved when it is actually destroyed. And I think we can see that entire populations are regarded as negligible life by warring powers, and so when they are destroyed, there is no great sense that a heinous act and egregious loss have taken place. My question is: how do we understand this nefarious distinction that gets set up between grievable and ungrievable lives?(22 mar 2010)
It may be help to analogize this with how “mass” is not “matter”. If I place 2 grams of matter on the left side of a balance scale, and 3 grams on the right, it will tip to the right, because 3g-2g=1g>0g. Where is this 1 gram of matter? Which “1 gram of matter” is the matter that tips the scales? The question is meaningless, because the 1g doesn’t refer to any matter in particular, just a difference in total amounts. But you can ask “how much mass does this matter have?”, and likewise “how much information does this data have?”(22 mar 2010)
Robert R. Wilson resisted it beautifully. Bob Wilson was a physicist
who Feynman had known well. He had helped recruit Feynman for the
Los Alamos project. Wilson was also an accomplished sculptor. He
had a foot in each of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures.
Wilson built Fermilab, the giant atom smasher in Illinois. But at
a congressional hearing in 1969, he was grilled by Senator John
Pastore, who wanted to know what an atom smasher was good
for. Does it in any way contribute to the security of the country?
Wilson said, “No, sir, I do not believe so. ”
“It has no value in that respect?” the senator
asked.
Wilson looked at him and said, “It only has to do with the
respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of people,
our love of culture … In that sense, this new knowledge has
all to do with honor and country. But it has nothing to do directly
with defending our country—except to help make it worth defending.”
I’m assuming you’re here at Caltech because you love science, and I’m assuming you’ve learned a great deal here about how to do science. I’m asking you today to devote some significant part of your life to figuring out how to share your love of science
with the rest of us.
But not just because explaining to us what you do will get you more funding for what you do… although it surely will… but just because you love what you do.
And while you’re explaining it, remember that dazzling us with jargon might make us sit in awe of your work, but it won’t make us love it.
Tell us frankly how you got there. If you got there by many twists and turns and blind alleys, don’t leave that out. We love a detective story. If you enjoyed the adventure of getting there, so will we.
Most scientists do leave that out. By the time we hear about their great discoveries, a lot of the doubt is gone. The mistakes and wrong turns are left out… and it doesn’t sound like a human thing they’ve done. It separates us from the process.
Whatever you do, help us love science the way you do.
Like the young man so head over heels about his sweetheart he can’t stop talking about her, like the young woman so in love with her young man she wants everyone to know how wonderful he is… show us pictures, tell us stories, make us crave to meet your beloved.
But Feynman was comfortable with not knowing. He enjoyed it. He
would proceed for a while with an idea as if he believed it was
the answer. But that was only a temporary belief in order to allow
himself to follow it wherever it led. Then, a little while later,
he would vigorously attack the idea to see if it could stand up
to every test he could think of. If it couldn’t stand up, then he
simply decided he just didn’t know. “Not knowing,”
he said, “is much more interesting than believing an answer
which might be wrong.” (Caltech Commencement)(22 mar 2010)
“Dick was… a profoundly original scientist [Dyson says].
He refused to take anybody’s word for anything. This meant that
he was forced to rediscover or reinvent for himself almost the
whole of physics … (Caltech Commencement)(22 mar 2010)
psychologically isn't it hard to presume someone innocent when they stand for trial?(22 mar 2010)
But this effect of producing great teachers has a dark side as well, especially in new fields, where there are more learners than teachers. Thankfully, despite being tempted several times, I never started a “how to blog” blog. More generally, this is the writing/speaking/teaching/consulting (W/S/T/C) syndrome that hits people who go “free agent.” We talked about before in my review of One Person, Multiple Careers (check out the comments as well).(21 mar 2010)
With all these flights of fancy, you may be wondering if geodesics have anything to do with reality. Of course they do. Einstein showed that light beams follow geodesics as they sail through the universe. The famous bending of starlight around the sun, detected in the eclipse observations of 1919, confirmed that light travels on geodesics through curved space-time, with the warping being caused by the sun’s gravity.
Here, a motorcycle rides along a geodesic highway on a two-holed torus, following the lay of the land. The remarkable thing is that the motorcycle’s handlebars are locked. It doesn’t need to steer to stay on the road. This underscores the earlier intuition that geodesics, like great circles, are the natural generalization of straight lines.
Another property that lines and great circles share is that they’re the straightest paths. That might sound strange — all paths on a globe are curved, so what do we mean by “straightest”? Well, some paths are more curved than others. The great circles don’t do any additional curving, above and beyond what they’re forced to do by following the surface of the sphere.
Here’s a way to visualize this. Imagine you’re riding a tiny bicycle on the surface of a globe, and you’re trying to stay on a certain path. If it’s part of a great circle, you won’t ever need to steer. That’s the sense in which great circles are “straight.” In contrast, if you try to ride along a line of latitude near one of the poles, you’ll have to keep turning the handlebars.
Picasso once noted that “when art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.”(21 mar 2010)
could it hurt grad students' and profs' writing ability to read and grade bad student papers?(20 mar 2010)
The degree to which mathematics has come to resemble the
natural sciences can be illustrated using the example I
have already cited: the Riemann Hypothesis. As I mentioned,
the hypothesis has been verified compuationally for the
ten trillion zeros closest to the origin. But every
mathematician will agree that this does not amount to a
conclusive proof. Now suppose that, next week, a
mathematician posts on the Internet a five-hundred page
argument that she or he claims is a proof of the
hypothesis. The argument is very dense and contains
several new and very deep ideas. Several years go by,
during which many mathematicians around the world pore
over the proof in every detail, and although they
discover (and continue to discover) errors, in each case
they or someone else (including the original author) is
able to find a correction. At what point does the
mathematical community as a whole declare that the
hypothesis has indeed been proved? And even then, which
do you find more convincing, the fact that there is an
argument - which you have never read, and have no intention
of reading - for which none of the hundred or so errors
found so far have proved to be fatal, or the fact that
the hypothesis has been verified computationally (and,
we shall assume, with total certainty) for 10 trillion
cases? Different mathematicians will give differing
answers to this question, but their responses are mere
opinions.
If a police dog confronts you with an officer, give up. If the police dog has been sent on ahead, kill the dog. You should sacrifice a bit of flesh to do this effectively: Offer your "dumb" hand to the dog and let it take it. (First wrap your arm in a shirt if you can.) Use the knife in your "smart" hand and try to drive it through the dog's braincase.(19 mar 2010)
Like almost all working scientists, Holland assumes that a valid explanation
of (any one of) these puzzles is a reductionist one, one that explains the
behavior or properties of the larger entity from those of its components and
their interactions. Or, as Ernest
Gellner put it in Legitimation of Belief, reductionism is “the
view that everything in this world is really something else, and that the
something else is always in the end unedifying. So lucidly formulated, one can
see that this is a luminously true and certain idea.” Turned around,
reductionism becomes the optimistic belief that, out of unpromising and
unedifying materials (say, colloidal carbon slime), edifying things can be
assembled, or even will assemble themselves (say, cherry blossoms unfolding in
April snows). Holland calls this the “creative side of reduction,” and if talk
of complementarity were still in fashion, he might easily have said that
reduction and emergence are complementary. More modestly, if there weren’t
emergents, there would be little point and less opportunity for successful
reductionism!
The problem of emergence is, roughly speaking —- and half the trouble with
it is that everything we say about it is only rough —- the flip side of the
problem of building blocks. Instead of asking how we, or other creatures,
carve Nature at the joints, we ask why Nature has those particular joints, or
even has joints at all, and is not (to continue with the metaphor) a single
undifferentiated hunk of inharmoniously quivering meat, a fleshy compound of
chaos and ancient night (John Holland, Emergence)(18 mar 2010)
After all, bridal mags are quite unashamedly bought for the advertising content, rather than any supposedly independent editorial: the idea is that brides-to-be will flick through them, looking carefully at pretty much every ad, searching for that idea which inspires them to spend thousands of dollars on something for their wedding. (Advertising on the iPad | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters)(17 mar 2010)
in the west wing, one of the staff will touch on some piece trivia during a meeting, but not be able to remember it (or whatever), and then out of nowhere, jsut before they leave hte room, bartlet will say—out of context now—-whatever the "answer" was(17 mar 2010)
when i work on a pe problem i can see directly how slow and uncreative my thinking can be. what does that say about my thinking in other situations, e.g., when evaluating policy alternatives?(17 mar 2010)
"babies are designed to survive new parents"(17 mar 2010)
if i was a boxer they'd call me gaseous clay(16 mar 2010)
f someone preensthemselves, they spend a lot of time making themselves look neat and attractive; used especially if you want to show that you disapprove of this behaviour or that you find it ridiculous and amusing.(15 mar 2010)
Musicians are usually more absorbed with performing the music than
with studying its looks, so this nitpicking about typographical
details may seem academical. That is not justified. This piece here
has a monotonous rhythm. If all lines look the same, they become like
a labyrinth. If the musician looks away once or has a lapse in his
concentration, he will be lost on the page.
In general, this is a common characteristic of typography. Layout
should be pretty, not only for its own sake, but especially because it
helps the reader in his task. For performance material like sheet
music, this is doubly important: musicians have a limited amount of
attention. The less attention they need for reading, the more they can
focus on playing itself. In other words, better typography translates
to better performances.
but anyway, i think kids go into investment banking because it's (a) something to do and (b) the sort of something-to-do that will sound good to just about everybody you know … (or maybe i should say, it’s the sort of something-to-do that doesn’t sound bad to just about everybody you know)(15 mar 2010)
The last ditch defense of the rational choice theory is to insist that it takes a theory to beat a theory, and that the behavioralists have only assembled a collection of empirical regularities without any unifying theory. The behavioralists indignantly respond that they do have a theory, although an incomplete one. The assumption on both sides is apparently that the sine qua non of social science is having a unified predictive theory. But perhaps this is merely another symptom of economics’ famous case of “physics envy.” Physics presents a breathtaking example of mathematical elegance combined with fantastically accurate predictions. But taking physics as the paradigm of science may be a mistake. Today’s great success story among the sciences may well be biology. Biology does have a central paradigm (evolution) and an understanding of its molecular basis. But organisms, because they are the products of evolution rather than design, are extremely complex, and no one seems to think that their features can be predicted in any detail on the basis of a deductive theory.(15 mar 2010)
eclecticism—a little precedent, a little originalism, a little instrumentalism, etc.(15 mar 2010)
Arguments are invalid if the conclusions don’t flow from the premises. Arguments are unsound if their premises are false.(15 mar 2010)
What does “It takes a theory to beat a theory” mean? What is the point or purpose of making this comment in a debate about normative or positive legal theory? Of course, the core idea is relatively straightforward. One can’t beat a theory just by nitpicking. We go with the best theory we have, warts and all. So if you want to beat a theory, you must show it is not the best theory we have, and the only way to do that is to produce a better theory. Hence, it takes a theory to beat a theory. Or to put it crudely, if we are playing “king of the hill,” whoever is on top stays there until pushed off.(15 mar 2010)
Selectivity, too, appears to be insufficient for prestige. To be sure, the highly selective position of “king” is prestigious; the problem is, the highly selective position of “lottery winner” is not. (15 mar 2010)
In June, Keats created “The Longest Story Ever Told,” a 9 word story printed on the cover of the eighth issue of Opium Magazine, “The Infinity Issue.” [103][104][105] The story is printed in a double layer of black ink, with the second layer screened to make each successive word fractionally less vulnerable to ultraviolet radiation. When exposed to sunlight, words will appear at a rate of one per century over the next one thousand years (Jonathon Keats - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)(14 mar 2010)
Classically, there is a very specific idea — the “capital asset
pricing model” — about how the risk-reward trade-off is supposed to go,
at least for stocks. The return on a portfolio of several stocks is an average
of those stocks’ returns. More
“I’m obsessed with the structure of pieces of writing,” explained McPhee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Princeton’s Ferris Professor of Journalism, who has taught his legendary class on writing at the University for more than 30 years.
goes to infinity with great dignity. (
are classically the opposite of random, they sure look random, which ones are wins or draws. Can they be used in applications where one desires pseudo-randomness, but also wishes to leverage the digested information of an 
-complete or 
-complete problem? There have been several papers in the past few years on the problem-solving power of deep strings, in general or specifically those that are witnesses for SAT. Certainly intense computational power has gone into building the files, so one feels they should provide power for doing something else.
[–]flukshun 74 points75 points76 points ago