Archives, page 236

The concept of Mujtahid, from Islam, is a useful one to help us understand the role that value-philosophers (particularly but not exclusively trailblazers) should take on themselves to play in society. Similar scholarly and behavioural/character traits should be present, mixed as well with aspects of being a prophet/lawgiver. Appropriately secularised and with a greater emphasis on creativity and the risks of opposing existing social order (whether entering into the field of law (practically or theoretically) or focusing on matters of compatible value or not), it is appropriate to say that this type of philosopher should hold themself to that level of standard.

I am not certain if the Shi'a term of Marjah applies as well by analogy, but it is also informative.

Beyond the relatively uninteresting-but-important thing of being a search engine (I know there are some interesting parts but overall it is not flashy), I think Google's success at being more than a search engine comes down to three things:

• Designing and adopting software institutions for effective, low-management, high-efficiency distributed code. This is sophisticated and interesting, but it's not obvious why someone would want it until one sees what Google has done with it. The failure of other software-as-service vendors to do this as generally hampers their flexibility and leads to high development, deployment, and maintenance costs for any service they decide to one-off. Google has published at least some of the code to manage this - even considering that they don't publish everything, the risk is low that they're helping their competitors too much because alongside the software infrastructure they've built hardware to its spec for long enough that they have a good lead.
• Designing and adopting software institutions for a powerful user interface in the browser. This is also sophisticated and interesting, and also not obvious until one sees why someone would want it. Apart from the search engine itself and very high end applications (e.g. Google Earth), all high profile google applications rely on this and would be very difficult to imagine done without that toolkit.
• Keeping a simple design æsthetic. Other search engines and internet services have come and gone, many of which made their sites prettier than google's. We should understand that as vanity - google's software is low-frill enough that it feels like a utility, with the very occasional quirks kept to a minimum and nondisruptive (e.g. custom google logos per certain days of year). Except when the user's network is bad, the Google experience is as fast and reliable as flicking a lightswitch

Any of Google's competitors could probably have done these things and been roughly as successful - the other specifics of Google are not necessarily significantly helpful (or helpful at all) towards their goals. I don't believe Google can live up to its 「don't be evil」 motto when their primary source of revenue is advertisements (adverts being intrinsically harmful). The tendency not to charge end-users for products helps them get mindshare, but if software is good enough at some useful tasks, it can still be expensive and thrive (e.g. Lotus Notes).

I recently reluctantly moved some spreadsheets for our lab on campus from GNUMeric on my laptop (which I utterly love) to Google Spreadsheets. The collaboration stuff is well done enough to make me forgive the interface.

From a very late walk home that would've taken 45 minutes if I had been 「on task」 but instead turned into a 2-3 hour adventure:

(view full entry for contents)

The novel 「Let the Right One In」 is rather good. It's a lot more chatty than the film, and the plot feels fuller. The film is still a masterpiece and the better of the pair, but I can recommend the book as well. Apparently young vampire romances are all the rage right now, with 「Twilight」 being the next series to succeed 「Harry Potter」 in popular novels. In contrast to a number of people trashing Twilight online, I'm just happy to see people reading instead of watching TV.

Sarah Palin resigned as governor. With her being unpredictable and tempermental, nobody's sure why she did it or what she has planned in the future. So long as she stays out of politics, I wish her well in future endeavours. She has the wrong temperament and is not qualified for high political office, but she's not particularly reprehensible. There are a lot of people like her - I think many people I've known who have not put a lot of effort in self-improvement would act as she has in most regards - she's recieved a lot of attention in the media that would look just as harsh shining on most people. Only a few people are suitable for high public office, and only a few can manage to look good enough to be elected to it. We just have to hope that we get more of the intersection of those bubbles rather than just the latter (maybe if we can raise the level of public discourse high enough the latter will be less of a concern because people will learn to recognise the former, presuming we stay in our current rough form of government).

Last night's "adventures":(view full entry for contents)

Incidentally, as it's come up recently, I know I've been mopy and probably often not very pleasant to read - if you don't want to read my LJ, feel free to remove me from your friends list without any worry that my feelings will be hurt. For most of you we're just acquaintences in real life anyhow (even though in many circumstances I wanted more). Know as well that if I do so I don't necessarily mean to be saying anything beyond that I am not regularly interested in reading your posts. There have been times where I have unfriended someone as part of cutting them out of my life entirely, but I will trust people to use overall judgement to figure out when I am doing that if it is not obvious.

The Valve/STEAM games are pretty neat, but they're quite buggy and I had to hack on some config files. I understand this has to do with their trying to be AMD64-aware.

The relation of Wikipedia's don't be a dick to judgement in law is something I'm chewing on again, particularly in the context of thorny torts like tortious interference. I think it's a problem when people seek to skirt the edges of laws (in areas not meant to be hard edges) to protect problem behaviour (we need some mechanism as a society to complement law with shunning/shunning/penalty for acts harmful to the more abstract interests of society, ideally one with fewer (but not no) teeth but also without the constraints of ex post facto), but there are several instances where it is unclear what the resolution should be. For instance, we can imagine environmentalists who learn of contracts against the interest of the biosphere to do their best to make it impossible for such contracts to be met. Tortious interference? Should business interests in the general case take interest over ecological interests except in narrowly defined circumstances? Contracts become ways to bind third parties when such an intent entirely within an organisation would presumably lack such protections. Yet it's not difficult to imagine circumstances where it is a useful tort to recognise.

The building next to Crazy Goat (near Whole Foods) is bizarre, interesting, and not unattractive.

Dear Google,

You get a big thumbs down for making it impossible to report a bug on google spreadsheets. No, I don't want to post to a forum. Set up Bugzilla, and stop wasting 15 minutes of my (and presumably others) time bouncing all over your site looking for a way to submit a bug report.

P.S. Your array evaluation mode is busted. If it's not powerful enough to do something, failing is better than doing something arbitrary. I admittedly am not a spreadsheet guru (although I have reluctantly learned a few tricks from some).

I don't use Excel outside of very rare circumstances(view full entry for contents)

Developed On Rule of Law and Legalism (essay) to the point where it might say some interesting things. I sometimes think it would be nice to just carry around a tape recorder and publish it at the end of every day, but the refactoring it for public consumption probably does me good for a few reasons - it helps me more aware of which concepts and frameworks I've already presented (and can thus rely on), it helps me consistently use standard English, it makes me explicitly recognise how important or sure something is and where it should be categorised, and it's something that's actually searchable. All the little scraps of paper I jot to myself are generally in not so externally understandable a state. On the other hand, there's hardly anything up while there is a lot more written or sketched.

I recently finished Neil MacFarquhar's 「The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday」. It was an excellent book that deserves a strong recommendation for anyone interested in Middle Eastern politics (and the relationship between people and government in general). Haaretz review, Google authors series with the author.

I again wish that Youtube did not give authors the ability ot disable ratings or comments on videos. The ability to annotate and rate is important in society, and providing easy tools to do that, if not done in the browser (where it really should be done) it makes sense not to make it difficult for people to do it on site if they offer it on other media.

This is the first example of the HTML canvas element that I have seen. It's not a perfect example (the text popups for some elements are invisible when they show up over another icon) but it's pretty neat (and less of a gross hack as Lemmings in DHTML).

I now have a phone number on Google Voice. (view full entry for contents)

Oh, and the below is very silly, a bit risque, and NSFW. (view full entry for contents)

I just spent the last hour reading about vos, usted, vosotros, and other things relating to second person in Spanish. This filled in the gap for me on why other languages like French use "vous". Apparently there's a lot of variance throughout Central/S. America on where vos replaces tú, and how vos is conjugated. For simplicity's sake, I like the forms that conjugate it the same as vosotros. Usted is apparently a merged form of "vuestra merced", while vosotros is (obviously) a merged form of "vos otros".

I've spent a fair bit of time over the last 2 weeks in Gates, and I am not at all impressed(view full entry for contents)

I've been using Amarok, a KDE-based graphical audio player, in order to allow me to easily rate my music collection (my normal way of playing music, a lightly sophisticated commandline program I wrote, is never going to be usable for that). Unfortunately, it's proven to be like pulling teeth to try to get those ratings back out (view full entry for contents)

I finished reading Tim Scott's 「Love in the Time of Fridges」 - it feels like the author watched Terry Gilliam's 「Brazil」 and replaced the dark humour with absurdist and light humour and added a lightly cyberpunk tone. It was still enjoyable, although I doubt I'll ever reread it.

Bought 2 gifts for my cats:(view full entry for contents)

Spotted a girl I almost got to know a year or so ago as an acquaintence today at a coffeeshop wearing really kinky pants. Life is strange.

Another empty weekend, attempting to fill it with work on philosophy, sketching.Doing my best not to think about spiral of depressive issues. Doing my best not to talk about spiral of depressive issues. Failing both a bit.

Indian instant meals, when poured from the envelope, remind me a lot of the meal in Terry Gilliam's Brazil - the nice picture of something tasty on the front combined with the goo on the plate.

There are now a few good covers of Coulton's 「Still Alive」 floating around on youtube. I have been hoping to see similarly good covers of the music from 「Dr Horrible's...」, but none have turned up.

It was a cheesy western story, and the Provolone Ranger had just ridden into town...

I jumped through all the hoops to get my ratings data back out of Amarok, and wrote some spiffy tools that others can use to do the same. Notes on that: (view full entry for contents)

and some thoughts about rankings of music and external tools to help people think: (view full entry for contents)

People on LJ and in my friendslist will get a link to the actual data files and more full results of analysis.