I wonder if, presuming that in the future an ever-increasing number of people will be blogging, twittering, and otherwise communicating more richly online (hopefully not too much less richly offline), people and society might come to have both a deeper "theory of mind" and come to present levels of it earlier on average - will we see blogs binding a family together? (and how much of the actual content of that will be "passive-agressive" sniping?) Both the possibility of the soapbox and the opening of doors seem to be there... I've seen a lot of people playing mmorpgs with their kids (perhaps replacing Monopoly, Tri-ominoes, and other physical games families played) - a key difference here is that for games that are inherently more socially open (that is, one doesn't need to visit the family house to join in), perhaps we'll start to see the barriers between generations break down - if the parents get their paladin and ranger to join the kids on the cleric and thief to go fight a dragon, and maybe a few friends of the kids (or parents) join in, society might become more tightly bound in some ways.
Wondering as well how much musical taste has to do with broad philosophical stances - do mathy people like mathy music? Does astructural music appeal particularly to hippie folk?
Today: Left the house a bit late, dinner of cupcakes and soup, then a few hours in the 61c. Current reading material is Jacob Neusner's "Major Trends in Formative Judaism", which I picked up a few years ago at a library sale in Columbus but never got to reading until a few days ago. It is written in a surprisingly awesome font. At 61c, I spent a good amount of time listening to the Intelligence Squared debate on whether freedom of expression should be absolute. If you take the time to listen to the debate, you might find my comments below interesting: (view full entry for contents)
I also listened to another I2us, and then worked on philosophy for a bit - working on the introduction to some of my thoughts for the next version of my website. I'm still stumped as to how much detail to go into, but at least things are coming together.
On the way back, I swung by the supermarket, and realised that the elusive quality of a meal that I've given the name "heartiness" is probably in fact protein content - I've often complained that most vegetarian food that one gets at restaurants that doesn't cater much to vegetarians lacks that quality, and have been thinking about what's needed in a meal to give it what's missing. Particulars:(view full entry for contents)
After that, went home, but had a pretty bad heart thing on the way there. Oh well.
I seem to occasionally get this confusion from other people, so ... if people want me to turn up at social events, be they dinners, hanging out, etc, they should make sure I know that such events are taking place. I am not socially well-connected, and don't typically hear about parties/gatherings except after the fact when people say "I had a great time at X" in their lj, and even when I do hear about them beforehand I don't like showing up unless I'm pretty sure I'm welcome (I usually am not sure). I am not hard to reach.
I wonder if Boss Hogg (dukes of hazzard) was meant in any way as a parody of Boss Twig (19th century NYC mayor)...
I don't think it's internally contradictory to say that I love this hot, humid weather and also like to take cold showers in the dark in this weather. While I prefer being continually warm to being less-than-warm, it is more awesome still to occasionally be briefly cold and warm back up. Something about those transitions is wonderful.
I miss having a wallfan to blow on me as I sleep though.
Randomly drawn to memories of seeing TMBG in the Bowry Ballroom in NYC, once with N, a few times alone and with other people... wondering what geographic features were the best predictors for cultural prominence, and how much momentum is a factor nowadays. I keep hearing about the decline of NYC culture...
Thinking about political frustration, inspired by recently watching Wag the Dog and Bulworth too close to each other. As they're both films that prod playfully at political problems in the USA (and accidentally other cultures - these are human problems rather than being specifically American ones), (view full entry for contents)
To tiptoe a bit further into politics in this post, I think this guy's criticism of Libertarian thought, at least the kind that I was involved in when I was younger, is mostly on par. It's unfortunate that he chose such an inflammatory title - it probably descends from internet tradition (flaming that is not flaming)..
Recently I've been playing a bit with searching public political campaign donations of people I know..(view full entry for contents)
I would be very pleased if CMU would talk to me about some of the jobs I've applied for soon, although I'm starting to apply for jobs at MIT now too (and probably will at UTAustin, should I see ones that look particularly cool (incidentally, I discovered that TAMU has a branch campus in Mexico. Life is sometimes strange)). I am also weirded out by how little money I seem to spend - it seems that my current savings/spendings might permit me to go jobless for another year or two if I wanted to. That would probably be a terrible idea though.
I should spend some days at the Beehive...
As a sysadmin, I've often inherited ugly bits of infrastructure that really needed replacement/reworking (often, but not always, some website someone was foolish enough to write in php connected to a poorly designed database designed by the same person - poor filesystem layouts are also common). I'm embarassed about the things I never got around to replacing, either because I became busy or because I was working on a replacement in my personal time (so I would feel ok reusing the work for my own purposes) and became distracted - I know other sysadmins do this because a lot of the time these ugly bits were several sysadmins old, and often the people between included some highly clued people.
I suspect that antispam will be an increasingly important focus for technology and employment in the future - we'll start to see wikis, blogs, and other sites that use increasingly sophisticated means (and better moderation systems) to cut spam, and companies offering these things will start to employ teams to monitor, search for, and remove spam from their sites. It's a pity that this looks like it'll be yet another technological arms race, and that instead of moving back towards notions of responsibility for our networks we have people pushing tor and other anti-responsibility tools - if neighbourhoods worked that way and masked people were dumping junk on my lawn, and whenever I swung a stick at them I were scolded because someone might be borrowing someone else's body to do it, I would be very pissed (with a very dirty yard). Being told that I should encase my yard in 30 foot yards like I'm living in mexico city is not a solution - CAPCHAs are cool, but they're only technologically cool as they're still a sign that our attitudes towards responsibility are broken. Perhaps if we had a more sensible attitude, the great firewall of China would cut off chinese botnets and do productive content filtering (spam email) rather than prevent people from being exposed to the idea that because the Republic of Taiwan has been politically, governmentally, and militarily independent from the People's Republic of China for over 50 years now and that calling them a renegade province at this point is laughable. If active network monitoring and filtering is used to kill spam rather than to block porn, I'm all for it. I would be equally happy if people took vigilante action against spammers, which may be more effective. Given how many robogenerated spamblogs I've spotted on my TV and gotten closed by reporting them to LJ folk, I'm playing with writing software to automagically recognise them, get approval from me (a kind of reversed usenet moderation for the modern day), and then automatically submit them as abuse to the lj abuse team.
I wonder what an ideal system for dealing with pregnancy in the workplace would look like. Lassiez Faire (as usual) sucks, and I don't think the current system is ideal. Maybe a general income tax should pay for a number of costs associated with a person's first two pregnancies and missed work, as part of a programme managed by local social workers in each locale?
Lawrence Lessig's 6 June 2008 Keynote at the National Conference for Media Reform is worth seeing. He has concrete, sharp, and convincing analyses of problems in our government, with wonderful text like...
How much extortion-enabling regulation is there?
This other presentation of his is also good (even if no longer very relevant).
I have stumbled upon a very widely used in-joke by game developers. In pretty much every game ever made that has sound effects and togglable settings for them, if you turn on the music and turn off the sound effects, occasionally you'll hear sound effects anyhow, and very occasionally sound effects will turn completely on regardless of your setting. This is independent of gaming platform, game type, etc. I fail to understand the sense of humour of game developers though - perhaps this kind of thing is easier to program than easter eggs, nowadays? :P
Anyone in the know should either let me in on the joke or tell me why it's so difficult to get that code right. Is it just that nobody tests sound setting permutations much?
I wonder if the Japanese writing system, which typically has words of native or Chinese origin written in a mix of hiragana (a syllabary) and kanji, and words of foreign (non-Japanese non-Chinese) words written in katakana (a "cursive" mirror of hiragana), leads to a lower rate of absorbtion for foreign words into feeling "fully native" in the language (say, the distinction between Weltanschauung or Schadenfreude, two reasonably widely understood German woods borrowed into English, versus Kindergarten or Gezundheit, which have fully joined the language). This is probably enhanced by the Japanese language not having particularly complex syllables, as a lot of foreign languages that have very different syllables would probably never fully feel natural in Japanese (unless they morphed into a fully Japanese form, like Pocket Mon(sters) -> Pokémon)
Off to the Beehive... I may be there the whole day, unless something more interestng turns up.
Recently saw, by jwz's recommendation, "The Man From Earth", a film about a man who claims to be many thousands of years old. It's a rather nice independent film, probably misclassified as sci-fi, as it's mostly about people talking in a single room (maybe a bit like Hitchcock's "Rope" in a few ways). Also pleasing: Amy's Vegetarian Chili.
I'm a bit bothered at the highly neurotic behaviour that the DMCA's safe harbour clause seems to bring about - for sites that do it, reporting queries that pull up large amounts of spam on their site with the expectation that they can follow them and purge things does not work, as anything more than being directed straight towards spam constitutes policing their content, making them legally responsible ... or so people quote their lawyers. It's a pity that it works out that way, although finding another compromise that works reasonably well might be difficult. In a more ideal world, policies like "We police content on our site how and when we feel like it but that doesn't make us responsible for when we don't" would presumably be doable too, although it's not hard to imagine problems with that.
I'm still digesting an article in Middle East Review on social favours in the Arab world and how it distorts the business and personal climate. (view full entry for contents)
I think I said 6 words today (vocally, not written/typed/etc), namely to specify the kind of tea I wanted at the coffeeshop. Fairly typical, as I don't usually run into anyone I know who's up for chatting, but the fact of it got me thinking about thought and words again. (view full entry for contents)
Frequent failures to get people interested in a trip to India Garden, Abay, etc: disappointing, both in terms of loneliness and that I usually don't like to eat out alone. Oh well.
Most of the way through "Major Trends in Formative Judaism" - quite an interesting book. As the title suggests, it attempts to see how interpretations of Torah and other related works shifted during early Rabbinical Judaism (the author makes use of "Judaisms" often, stressing that the community was diverse in perspective and formulation) and how closely those can be said to relate to pre-rabbinical Judaism. It is a scholarly work, but only lightly so in that it does not cite original sources quite enough, and also that its phrasing suggests a concern with what people should believe today (or perhaps I focus too much into the author's phrasing). I would be interested to find scholarly sources on pre-rabbinical Judaism as well, although as I understand we don't have a lot of information of the specifics of that.
I am having trouble scripting using the screen utility, and am frustrated.(view full entry for contents)
On the upside, I think I've figured out how to use DIVs instead of tables for my blog software - here's a snapshot sans tables. To my readers who read my blog in its original form (that is, not the Livejournal mirror), does the div form look better or worse? Does it render correctly? As you probably have noticed, while my computer knowledge is broad and deep in some places, I am not very good with making pretty interfaces :P
I recently had an awesome idea for a very geeky party, but I suspect I don't really know enough people who would come to pull it off. Another Ceilidh would be kind of interesting too, or even regularly holding dinner (once a week?), .. I dunno. I'm not good at organising these things though, especially now, and it would just kill me to organise a gathering and have almost nobody show up.
