It would be awesome to have a giant food fair (or market) where there were booths on a huge world map, with food traditions for an area being represented by vendors in roughly corrisponding places on the map. There are parts of the world which have food traditions that I've never sampled from, and it'd be a fun way to rectify that by wandering around such a fair. Perhaps the UN should arrange this.

I also sometimes wonder how different things would be if Russia had never gained territory in or east of Siberia. Given that Eastern Russia is, by-and-large, not ethnically Russian, perhaps we'd see a number of additional Asian countries, and perhaps China, Korea, and Mongolia would be larger. It seems like it would be very interesting to spend a few years wandering around in central and eastern Russia..

"You're all here to understand conflict. We have a lot of instinct relating to conflict, used since before the dawn of our species to help us flee or fight. From the personal to the tribe, some people can smell it coming, from the silence of efforts to coexist being abandoned, to no more jockeying for position. We learn to hear the approach of a fight as mutually stifled wills shift our realities. Some use this chance to prepare to give something up, or to flee long before conflict arrives, and some arrange - learn the weak points of coworkers, friends, lovers, perhaps seek outside aid. Some of you want to learn the approach of conflict to avert it - often this is worse, as the moment of conflict is a sign that the old reality is no longer justified." -- Isa wrinkled her brow, absentmindedly looked up the profile of her professor.

To chew on: (view full entry for contents)

Han von Meegeren: an interesting "forger" of the Dutch masters, who painted original paintings in their style, attributed to them in the hopes that once they had received acclaim, he would reveal his authorship and achieve fame. My thoughts: his personal ethics were worthy of condemnation, but he was also a great artist and the works he made were not less worthy of their acclaim by the fraud. Were the conversations and insights made by trying to combine the claimed artists' perspective with the specifics of the work invalid? To what extent is appreciation for authenticity as part of the character of a work overrated or a failing? Should we now appreciate his art under his own name?

A year or two ago, I was being courted by Google (which was particularly cool because it was initiated by them). (view full entry for contents)

I hope CMU or UCSB actually ends up interviewing me for some of the positions I've applied for - I'll certainly be eating crow if I turned down this job and don't manage to get back into academia after all, even if the pay wasn't what I was looking for.

I imagine we all experience a bit of silliness/awkwardness/fumbles when it comes to jobhunting and finding a good match - it's probably a lot like dating, even moreso in that if one has a lot of experience getting things started, it's often because one isn't particularly good at keeping things going.

It seems to me that in evolution, a number of the useful mutations that survived are much more likely to have happened in the female than the male. Three primary reasons:

1. During pregnancy/rearing for species where the mother is not dependent on a pack or a partner, the mother could survive during a crisis (a la punctuated equilibrium) while the father could be long dead due to lack of that mutation
2. New habits/adaptations that have a learning element to them could be taught by the mother, who in many species raises the litter
3. For mutations that benefit the whole species, the X-chromosome specific traits are more important than the Y-specific ones. Additionally, any innovation from mDNA would have to pass from the mother (but ... maybe this latter point is irrelevant - is mDNA something where beneficial mutations can be fruitful or is it stable/background enough that it won't make a difference?)

Of course, since this just popped into my head this morning, I might be utterly wrong, and very likely am not original. Qualified people are encouraged to comment, and other scientific "laypeople" too :P I am amused to call science-interested university-educated people that, even if it is common.

For those of us with OLPCs,(view full entry for contents)

Maxwell's Demon:Hungry cats "herding" people towards their food bowl, as if the person had forgotten where it is. Blocked "retreat" when one makes a wrong turn, otherwise an honour guard.

Big differences between the early internet and what we have now, from the perspective of a user: centralisation of search and flattening of media. (view full entry for contents)

Daydream: Chinatown planes (like Chinatown busses that run between cities on the east coast) - unstable, packed, noisy planes flying between chinatowns all over the US for $30 a person. People would bring on the plane whatever they could get away with, with live chickens, people carrying large amounts of things for arbitrage, etc. No insurance, no liability, no complaints, much flavour. It seems this stereotype is a big component of what we've come to consider cyberpunk...

"The Other Pittsburgh" flipped into existence recently - empty streets, summer hours, nobody around. It's kind of creepy.

I think I have enough entertainment materials on my laptop that my nonsocial entertainment/amusement/things-to-do needs would be met for at least a year if I stopped seeking new stuff of each. In a digital world, we all might have a cache of fun. I wonder how big other people's caches are in this way...

Surprised: Fit almost all my books into three large boxes. I've decided to pack things up for the amusement factor - apart from programming, reading, and enjoying the outdoors, I don't have anything else to spend my days on right now. For people in Pittsburgh, I am highly available for adventures/company provided little or no money is needed to participate.

Feeling a bit blah, hoping it doesn't turn into an emotional tumble.

I occasionally get spam for online drugs where they use the word apothecary instead of drugstore. As much as I loathe spam, I can almost approve of this because it's such a cool word.

Another thing that will be written in history books: many western nations that participated in the invasion of Iraq had, as a consequence, their ruling party suffer a loss of public confidence. Spain went socialist, American Neoconservatives got a very bad name (and likely the Republicans as a whole will suffer for the next few elections, despite their well-orchestrated reality-denying efforts), and Britain... the Scots are seeking independence and the Labour party is about to face a loss of many seats in Parliament. A lot of this has to do with economics as well, but invading other nations only rarely benefits a nation in the material sense (parasitically when it does) and it's difficult to imagine that it would be materially good for humanity except in rare situations and over long terms. Even given foreknowledge, I wonder if it would've been politically doable for doubters of the invasion to push against it in these nations - the American "bandwagon" was, as I understand, quite strong - was it as strong in other nations? Hermann Göring's famous quote remains one of the most important observations about mass psychology in politics...

Al Jazeera reports on the search for a running mate by Obama and McCain. Personally, I think Russ Feingold would make a great running mate for Obama (or president, someday..), and it's unfortunate that that may not be in the cards. None of McCain's likely running mates are as likable as he is, sadly.

Yesterday: walked around a lot, latelunch at IG, nice reading time on Oakland lawn (reread Neverwhere), hung out at 61c, went home, fed cats, watched two movies, played with cats, went to bed. Today: Much the same except swap lunch for dinner at Aladdin's, and haven't (yet) watched any movies or gone to bed.

One of the films I watched was Woody Allen's Manhattan - while walking around today, thought about how nontraditional the "plot structure" from his movies are - they don't tend to have a strong protagonist/antagonist duality, often lack a plot arc (or at least, they're not about the plot), and feel more like an earthy exploration of humanity. His films feel like a mix between an extended philosophical skit and blogging - in order to really like Woody Allen films, one has to really like Woody Allen and the perspective he has on humanity - too many films, I think, are made with the idea that "coming-of-age" or "learning to have courage" are the only themes in character development worth doing, making films both utterly predictable and demeaning to their audience. Woody Allen's characters struggle with ideals and concepts in a morally complex world, and that's what makes his films beautiful. (view full entry for contents)

Rereading Machiavelli's Discourses - basic idea that with a relatively corrupt (nonvirtuous) people, institutions that worked well for a more virtuous people would fail them - seems sound. Also: with sufficient corruption, no system of government can cope well, and building virtue in society is a slow and difficult process (M's two systems of virtues come into play here - a "good" person is needed to begin the task of reforming society, but this same person must be willing to do things that are "bad" by traditional moralities in order to bring about change - a "good person willing to do bad when needed" (good/bad being defined in this case as traditional individual morality) is what is demanded of a prince. He notes as well that throughly reforming a people usually takes more than a generation - a people must be fortunate enough to have at least two such good leaders in a row to improve in a lasting way.

A central issue with political philosophy - political possibility (and cultural possibility - managing a state and managing society are closely tied tasks) are not obviously constrained fields, and coming up with plausible constraints, qualifiers, or direction that don't feel arbitrary or insufficient. One source of direction - notion that any political philosophy, operating within society, that is not sustainable were it to to dominate society, that could not "explain" historical and actual situations across the world and deal with them sensibly, is not worthy of consideration. Among many other things, this suggests we not consider systems that are absolutely pacifist, and it also tells us that in order to be taken seriously, a political philosophy should be informed by a broad understanding of history, world events, and psychology. Whether it's important to start from ideas inspired by this (e.g. we must be willing to tax people in ways that not every individual consents to, or we must be willing to draft people, etc) or just ensure compliance is another matter - starting from them may result in a system that is much more practical by these measures, although it may also impose enough flavour to the system so as to rule out systems that would be both plausible and worth considering.

Some years ago, I spoke with GerardM about his project WiktionaryZ - it had a lot of goals, starting from providing parallel definitions for a broad variety of words and ending in having semantically realistic translations (or at least explanations) between languages. It is now called OmegaWiki, and appears to have advanced a bit further towards its goals - I particularly like how my chosen test case, cat, has other nicely structured information about the term - I still don't think it's possible to do provably effective things with this kind of structure, but it seems likely that this will both be really useful for learning and be pragmatic for "getting close" to good translations through machines. It's nice how we have words like "strong-AI" and "weak-AI" to describe to what degree we think sentience can be understood/created, but we seem to lack similar terms for thoughts on things beyond that - would people understand what I mean when I say I'm a symbol-skeptic?

As someone who frequents a coffeeshop, I recently realised that there are not too many things the employees do that I would not be willing to do myself, as a chore, were the coffeeshop a collective - I would actually rather prepare my own tea/cereal, and occasionally sweeping/mopping/etc. I think I'd be more willing to keep a shared space in really good condition than my own (while I'm living alone) because it's easier to be motivated improving other people's environment than my own. The important way the 61c differs from my apartment is that there are lots of people there (well, and it's in a central location) - I wonder how hard it would be to work out all the details for a shared space with facilities that would act, among other things, as a coffeeshop/meeting place. I suspect managing money, policing use of resources, and managing responsibilities, all in ways somewhere between traditions of a business and a family, would be the difficult part. This is the kind of thing where having existing, tested societal solutions is a lot easier than attempting to innovate.

Quick set of questions that captures most of the variation in NES platform games: (view full entry for contents)

Of course, it would not be hard to think of more.

Courtesy jwz's idea of gluing Livejournal's lj-latest RSS feed into the phosphor "mode" of xscreensaver (which runs on my "TV" continually when I'm not using it), I spotted a rather interesting meme being tossed around on LJ - a set of questions to help us be more aware of how our social class may have privileged some of us. I had conversations that made me more aware of how privileged I was back before I left the nest (the satellite town of Cleveland we lived in was very wealthy, but there were a few not-very-well-off people there, some families there having kids I befriended - I dimly remember a Marzola family and a few others). So, the meme follows, but apparently the people who started this one (at UIndiana) claim copyright and want a mention. So, Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka,(view full entry for contents)

Moving onto the meme itself, "What privilege do I have": (view full entry for contents)