Ahh... I'm back. In more ways than one. Today, I had one of those really bad headaches where you wish you had never been born.. I left work a bit early, biked home (with my eyes closed most of the way), and spent some quality time (heh) with a cold washcloth on my forehead. 6 hours of feeling like .. yes, like Zeus giving birth to Athena. Anyhow, I'm alive again, but probably will go to sleep soon.

Last week was really busy for me.. 2 term papers, some homework, and an oral presentation for Philosophy class. The Psychology paper I'm fairly happy about, doing an analysis of Autism's effects on the brain and what it suggests for different types of theories affecting brain function. It was mostly rewritten by the time I gave the disasterous oral presentation, but I did give it a bit more polish. The Philosophy paper was an analysis of Chaos theory, how it fits into Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, and what it suggests about the realism-antirealism debate in philosophy. I'm happier about the Kuhn-Chaos interaction than the realism-antirealism one -- the book was really good (Gleick's Chaos), and I was able to get a decent number of secondary sources, but the topic (which I chose from a short list of suggested ones) seemed kind of forced, and so I the argument I was making on that front was kind of forced. Also, as there's no final in that class, that's pretty much all I'll see of those people unless I bump into them on campus randomly.. and it makes me kind of sad. I've shared some good arguments with them on interesting topics, and those are the kind of ties that I really like. Heck, there was only time for 4 of us to present our papers, but the person who went after me was exploring a topic that I've been slowly chewing on, directly analyzing the claims of the Realist and Anti-Realist camps, and asking if one of the other schools of thought on the topic might be better. I guess a cool thing about that experience was that I both got to chew on philosophy and I learned a lot about a field that I didn't know that much about before. The Gleick book was a bit light on math, but that's not a big deal -- I'm sure, if I get the time, I'll be able to find a good second book on the topic.

Yesterday, after work, I moved one of the tables from what was my computer room up into the front room.. it's surprising how much a difference a table can make to a room. It's nice being able to sit up while doing computer stuff in this room, and I suspect I'll use my microscope more often, it being more accessible and visible. Over time, I've always had impulses, swinging both ways, between having lots of stuff, and having very little. Right now, the pendulum is swinging towards less, and so I've been doing some cleaning and consolidating. My apartment is rather clean right now, and I'm tempted to stop using the computer room altogether.

It's interesting -- thinking that I'm slowly moving from a academe-flavoured pop-flavour of psychological understanding to an actual science-based one.

I just opened the shades for the front windows, and it appears that while I've been suffering the headache, snow came down and caked the street. It's pretty, but I'm sure that biking will soon be impossible to get to work, and I'll either need to switch back to hoofing it or start taking the bus. Some time ago, a friend found it humourous that I moved to another 'frozen city', at the same time warning me that the person I moved here for was unbalanced and that things wouldn't turn out well in the end. Kind of amusing, now that I realize it, that although I took very badly to the advice at the time, they were right, in the same way that I once offered them some very hard advice, and in similar painful circumstances, they found I was right. You finally paid me back, and I just realized it. And yet, I find myself in a similar circumstance, perhaps, in offering advice to someone in town that I've never actually met, but I'm one degree away, and we've chatted online. It's not precisely analogous -- as far as I know, her chosen, and her relationship with him, is fine, although they're currently seperated by a large physical distance, soon to be closed. Despite the pain I've been through, I still have to say.. always bet on love, and if you're thinking seriously about something that'll change your life, do it. You never know if love will work out, you never know even how a complex relationship will work out, or if moving someplace new will be a disaster, but firstly, if you don't, you'll both be giving up on love and piling a lot to regret on your shoulders. Secondly, all the changes you'll make in your life and yourself will no doubt be things that will enrich you. I'm certain, looking back from age 70, remembering a risky (within reason) life with some gambles that paid off and some that didn't is far better than having lived the other, dull life, having won only regret. I don't regret gambling. It hurt me, and it helped me, and it changed my life a lot. Heck, I might've even missed out on a chance to date someone really cool -- who knows where that might've gone? But then again, maybe I didn't. I'm in a .. well, kind of in a PhD program, I have a cool job, and I'm in a pretty city. And W, at the very least, in not too long you'll be someplace new, someplace cool, and with luck, in a romance that'll last to the end of your days. Go for it. At the very least, you'll be somewhere where everyone has a cool accent :)

So, to catch up, on Monday, I had a very unpleasant conversation with my mom. I don't think we'll be talking for awhile. It was on a trip to drop my car off at a local Fnord to prep it for inspection.. while I was there, I found they could actually do the inspection there too, so when they called later in the week, I told them I'd be leaving it there while I filled out the other paperwork so they could actually perform the proper inspection. Tomorrow, I need to navigate to a DMV somehow to do all that stuff. Yay. Of course, having gone to Fnord in my car, getting home was .. interesting. I stopped by the bookstore out there, got 2 pieces of new music (Flogging Molly and Bad Religion) and while in there, got some advice on how to brave the bus system.. not enough advice, apparently -- I was waiting in the cold for about an hour and a half, and very much regretted not bringing gloves. Eventually the right bus came and took me into Shadyside, and from there it's just a short hike to my place. I did enjoy using my GPS on the bus -- it was fun watching the turns on a map, and I got the feeling that the other bus passengers had never seen anything like it. After a quick stop at E'n'P to grab some good, I went home, popped in the new CDs, ripped them, and worked on the term papers. Both are pretty good. The Bad Religion CD, The New America, has 4 tracks I really like..

You've got a Chance I love my Computer Whisper in Time The Hopeless Housewife

The other tracks are all decent.. and a bit of hunting on the net showed that this CD is again incomplete -- the Japanese version had two more songs, both of which I snagged online. I don't know why Bad Religion does that -- with this CD and with The Process of Belief, the extras on the Japanese version would've been among my favourites if I had them.. without the internet, I would've missed out on some really good songs. The Flogging Molly CD, Swagger was also nice.

On Tuesday, there was a 20% off sale for Faculty/Staff at the CMU bookstores, so some of us from my group took a trip out there, enjoyed some of the free food, and got some stuff. I picked up a Neil Gaiman Sandman 'book', a nice expensive fountain pen, and .. hmm.. some other book I can't remember offhand. It was science fiction by one of the monty python bunch. Naturally, after that I worked on the term papers, finishing the psych one and getting the philosophy one mostly done.

On Wednesday, I finally came across a note to myself about a fascinating paper I saw in the Philosophy department office some time back, and a bit of googling turned it up: Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology. I don't know enough of its content to talk about it yet, but I paged through it while I was getting something else and it looked interesting.

Thursday was pretty much covered by the school stuff, and today .. was just a busy work day, until the headache.

Some snippets and quotes I've jotted down over the week:

And as the ground began its slow acceleration up to meet him, he had his final moment of Zen.. I could grow to enjoy this, and a chuckle.. each piece of rock below represented his final destiny, the cliff above, the vanity of a normal life.. he was shedding it all now in this last act, he was descending, losing his humanity. Only by stepping off could he truly interact with it.

"I really doubt the FBI is that cool" -- Jacob Joseph, regarding the FBI using Tempest-type technologies (Note that the link has a narrower definition of Tempest than the actual one, and that this is from an IM conversation with Jacob)

And finally, the playthings of humanity, the toys we played with when we were gods, they've slipped from our fingers, and when they fell, we fell further. When the puppet has grasped the puppeteer, will it show undeserved mercy?

For work, I've been trying to glue our code to the R language, and it's not all that easy. Here's something that was in my IM message for much of this week:

Gluing together things that really don't want to be glued together. If I had business cards, that'd be on it. ---------------- | Pat Gunn | Programmer or Sysadmin | Gluer of Reluctant Things ----------------

I think I feel an essay coming on, sometime soon. Largely, I'm tired of hearing, in response to corporate abuse of environment or people, that they're just fulfilling their obligations to their stockholders. I even have a nice title... Profit is No Excuse: A call for Accountability of Business

Ahh, yes, yesterday a friend stopped by and I put linux on his laptop. That was cool. What's cooler is, while doing the updates to Fedora, I came across a good yum archive that has packages for a lot of the legally iffy packages that arn't actually part of fedora. This is a lot better of a way to get them than to hunt down the individual packages from all over the net. And yes, these packages arn't for trying to break into the NSA or anything, they're for doing simple things like playing mp3s or DVDs on linux. Windows users rarely are exposed to the legal stupidities that happen behind the scenes in software development. It's absolutely delightful that every time I play a DVD on my laptop, I'm using software that's illegal to use.. with every mp3 I play, I'm doing the same thing. Yay. Anyhow, if I get brave enough, I'll clear the hodgepodge off, and do a clean install of those packages from that yum repository. I'm just worried that reconstructing the hodgepodge might be tricky, if the new configuration is missing some functionality.

And now, let's dig through the recent bookmarks I've saved for you. Some very funny small-farms propoganda. This is some pretty obvious irony. I mean, just look at it. Graphics.. of text. Of crappy-looking non-antialiased blocky text. Cluttered design. And, of course, these are the people telling you how to design your website. ... heh. An article on who's going to be declared the best German.. Apparently, got down to Karl Marx and Konrad Adenauer (leader of Germany right after WW2). The fact that I had never heard of Adenauer before the article kind of says it all.. Notable others in the top 10 are Bach, Gutenberg, and Einstein. While looking to see who else was on the list, I came across a particularly disgusting essay Martin Luther wrote.

Good music, bad website design Stuff on gypsies I found while looking for music. See someone's thought process while programming.. kinda. Maybe it's not that interesting. *shrug* Panic in enemy halls Observations on IM usage Large, cool picture Exercise is addictive for some people. I've seen it :) The wages of greed.. Actually, this is kind of an unusual case -- normally, smart, greedy people get rich, they just find that wealth isn't all it's cracked up to be, and by the time they even realize they're wealthy, they're realizing that they wasted their life getting there. Everyone's favourite unethical, scummy election-system buildersdecides not to sue some of the people who are spreading some very embarassing leaked internal documents. LinuxGazette, a monthly newsletter, is in some tricky times. For some time, they were hosted by a company called SSC, which provided them with their old domain, an editor, and some other resources. Recently, SSC tried to take charge of the thing, making some technical decisions that they disagreed with, and as they began to detangle themselves from SSC, SSC trademarked LinuxGazette and said they're going on as LinuxGazette. Apparently, legal threats and letters are flying back and forth between SSC with their LinuxGazette.com and LinuxGazette with their LinuxGazette.net. Fun. Naturally, I sent SSC a letter asking them to give up their misappropriated name and trademark. They'll probably ignore me.

Businesses just keep on taking. Previously, in the courts, it was determined that public data couldn't be copywritten. Clever businesses decided they didn't like that. So they slipped crap like this into the appropriate hands, along with money to oil the palms. And that's how laws are made.

Speaking of slimy doings, Here is the true site for one of the bunch of jerks who grabbed thousands of domains and just pointed it at their search engine so it doesn't look unused. I doubt anyone uses their thing, it's just a front for their real business -- selling the domains to people who actually can use them. Grr.

I recently dug through my cookie file, and was amazed at how much crap is in there. I deleted 95% of the cookies, and now have it ask me about each and every cookie that's being considered for setting.

I've seen these guys out on the grass between buildings at CMU, now there's an article on what they're doing. Ahh, one of the neat things about CMU -- so much interesting and strange stuff happens here. It reminds me of the science fairs/expos countries used to throw, back before the 60s, just to show off what they were doing, and spur investment. NSH's roboceptionist is like that -- I doubt anyone will actually use it for directions -- people generally are just playing around when they crowd around it now.. but it's powerful as a symbol, and it probably will inspire more people to choose CMU as their school.

Here's yet another example of what happens when you combine normal statistical oddities with sufficiently gullable people. Gotta love religion, folks. If people were just a bit more skeptical, less desperate for meaning, and understood more of the sciences (in this case, statistics), we wouldn't have Wicca, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Bahai, and all that other crud.

One of my sisters apparently is having trouble with pop-ups. Mozilla blocks these normally (configurable), but users of IE don't have that luxury. Next time I'm in town, I'll try to convince her to switch to Mozilla, but in the meantime, this looks really neat. It also has hooks into Archive.org's internet archive resource. Neat!

A friend sent me this article on Israel. It seems pretty on-target to me. I sometimes wonder if there's a more effective way to talk about these things though -- it seems like, from the people I've talked to about these kinds of things (not just this in particular), they're led by something inside that's emotional, and the fact that they're willing to argue for it is purely because that's all they can do to hope it spreads (their perspective). Laid bare, they'll stick to their fondness for the idea even when it comes down to a base value.. but then again, isn't that what we all do? The difference is that they place love of a nation or a race as a base value, and we don't.. but really, base values can't be justified anyhow. I have ecology as a base value, and although I'll certainly argue for it, and do stuff to advance it, when it comes down to it, I can't justify it. I'd like to be able to say there's a big difference, but there really isn't. I find racism to be abhorrent, and the presently dominant western attitude has done so as well.. but not everyone does, and in fact I've had conversations with some really intelligent people who nontheless have told me they favour their race, would do business with someone who shares it over people of others, want to ethnically purify their land, want to ban racial mixing, want to 'take back' their land that they see as under occupation (From scots and irish to kurds, american indians, and palestinians) and all sorts of other things (no, this isn't all from the same person). Philosophy is tricky stuff -- sometimes it's hard to make it do what we wish it would do. Wouldn't it be nice to pretend that it tells us that the way we do things is provably the right way, special, and wonderful? That's the land of make-believe moral absolutists live in..

Are the spammers striking back? This is both interesting, and it shows that some high schools have some really cool classes. I think my appreciation of history has increased as I've gotten older and have a more full grasp of politics.

While I was looking for good things to get from the library on chaos, I came across this totally off-the-wall site on Chaos, looks like it's trying to make Chaos into a .. well, just take a look. Very weird.

The Kyoto pact is currently waiting for Russia's decision. If Russia decides to approve, then it's binding, if not, it falls apart. This is the same pact that the U.S. decided not to sign, as it decided that industry is worth more than the environment in this instance. *sigh*

Japan's wrapping up a new maglev train that'll go ~500Mph in operation.

A brief thought on the obesity "epidemic"... Sorry, it is willpower and education. If a gastric bypass is actually going to work to keep you within certain weight limits, then what it's doing is simply forcing you to do what you could choose to do anyhow, that is, not eat as much. Yeah, it might be difficult, but it'll be just as hard with the bypass, the only difference being that you won't have a choice at every point along the way. Of course, learning about diet can help too (I'm not at all obese, but I'm not very healthy -- but I'm working on fixing that with a better diet and a more active life). So, if you're not happy with your body, and it's actually a fault of your body, sure, see the doctor, but a lifestyle change is in order. A good doctor will probably tell you that anyhow. Mine did.

Gotta love the government..

I really don't know what to think about this. Press issues in the Western world seem to be so much simpler than those in troubled areas. It's a pretty good test of how far freedom of speech should go, and is an area where, IIRC, in certain circumstances that value folds to another in our legal system.

Joke... Q: How do German Academics protest something? A: They arrange 24-hour lectures Well, except it's not a joke. They're apparently protesting funding cuts by having a lecture-in, open to the public.

Danger, Will Robinson! Here's a site with a Neat Logo

Umm.. I have more to say, but not now.

Now, I'm gonna get some sleep.