Those moments when we say "Aha!", and think we've learned something about ourselves, the universe, or a situation are quite gratifying. Depending on the thought, and our attitudes, these moments can change everything, sending us down an entirely new path in life. Sometimes these revelations are, alas, wrong, either taking us away from truth and/or good paths in life, or taking us in another nonproductive direction from our original bad path. A big part of intellectual maturity is to take life with a certain humility, realizing when our conclusions may be based on wishful thinking, an urge to act, bad judgement, or bad data. Having this attitude is in some ways more important than being right -- it forms a support for a certain kind of intellectual integrity.
Sadly, some kinds of virtue can be barriers for success in a variety of endeavors. It's sometimes been said that virtue often requires giving things up. A lot of interpersonal relations work better without certain kinds of virtue. Of course, there are a lot of things apart from virtue that can get in the way.
Recently, I've noticed people saying things to me in one place anonymously, and repeating them in other nonanoymous ways, sort of like a puzzle with coordinates on the back. It's strange to see those kinds of things.
I'm thinking of completely restarting my website from scratch. My philosophy has changed a lot over time, and in many ways has changed focus -- I'm more interested in what constitutes my idea of personal virtue than how society should be structured. Specifically, I have an idea of the philosophical life that I'd like to explore in depth. A fair amount of my old philosophy doesn't represent who I am or what I think anymore. The change in focus is more significant though. Even outside of philosophy, I'd like to move everything to a CSS-centric design.
Based on my earlier conclusions that Verizon is a bad company, I am working to be rid of them, and today I accidentally moved much closer. About two weeks ago, I lost DSL, and after some recent investigation, it turned out that Verizon wasn't sending me phone bills for some time, so I had stopped paying them, and in response they cut off my service. I called yesterday to have them turn it back on, and called Speakeasy to ask about having them reactivate the DSL on their end, and they mentioned that they offer DSL over raw phonelines, not requiring me to keep phone service. I arranged that and called back Verizon today to cancel my phone service order. As of now, my only tie to Verizon is my cellphone, which I hope to fix as soon as I can afford a Treo 650 and to pay off my remaining contract to them for the service. This pleases me.
I ran into Debb today on my way to work, and we chatted for a bit. She's apparently thinking of moving back to Columbus after she graduates. It somehow wasn't that weird -- new relationships can clear some of the oddness from old, failed ones. It's also strange how people change over time. Later on the way to work, I stopped on one of the bridges and looked out over the valley and thought about life. I thought what it would be like to have children, and have them asked what their father and mother do at work, and if there being a good answer should change how I live my life. I don't think so -- I don't think I've ever been into having a typical career, and while I really want kids at some point, I'm starting to wonder if I'm getting a bit too old for that. Many of my friends are well on their way to marrage, and while until the last few weeks, I thought things were progressing towards that for me and Nicole too, I'm back a bit below ground zero again. I would want to date someone for about two years before getting married to them, I think, and I'm almost 27 now. At earliest, I imagine kids being born when I'm 31. That's not much of a margin. If I don't meet the right person in a few years, I'm likely to never have kids. The Qatar thing would make things even less likely for that prospect if I do it. It's further made more difficult by the way that the male mind is programmed to find young women attractive, but as I get older, the people who I'm attracted to would become more of a perversion and a mental mismatch to pursue. I wouldn't mind growing old with someone, but I at least want a good slice of time where there's a lot of physical attraction to go with the rest of the attraction. Some of my friends and family suggest that I shouldn't mark off all religious people from consideration. I can't see that changing about me, but who knows where the future may bring me. Right now, I'm far too much still in love to be looking for someone new.
Today, I used eval() for the first time seriously in my Perl programming days. In many ways, eval() can be seen as a failure of the programming language it's used in to make something easy enough, or alternatively a failure of the programmer to come up with an appropriate way to encapsulate something. In this case, I do know how to program what I want in C, and could've done the equivalent in Perl, but it would've been a pain -- I was building an occurance memorizer into a multilevel hash, and the occurances (and hence the level depth) were not knowable until runtime. If, for example, an occurance were
11-FOO-45-BAR-LALA-45
I wanted to do:
$foo{11}{FOO}{45}{BAR}{LALA}{45}=1;
The non-eval way to do it would be to yank apart the hash at each level, create new anonymous hashes and play games with references in order to build the whole structure as we get more occurances. To attempt to see if we've seen an occurance, we'd of course need to do the opposite (although it's simpler to test than to memorize). That's ugly.
My solution:
sub memorize_permut($@)
{
my ($par, @fields) = @_;
if(! defined eval('$$par' . join(, map {"{$_}" } @fields) . ' = 1;') )
{
die $@;
}
}
sub recall_permut { my($par, @fields) = @_; my $returner = eval('defined($$par' . join(, map{"{$_}" } @fields) . ')' ); if(! defined($returner))
{
die $@;
}
return $returner;
}
Simpler, but much less legible.
There's a lot of interesting news to catch up on, and because I'm likely to be to Columbus and back before I make another entry, let's get it all out..
Some researchers are working on implanting human neurons into nonhuman embryos. Cool, and naturally upsetting to the usual folk.
Saudis are taking steps towards democracy. Hmm. They still don't want women to lead services, and are oh-so-impressive in other ways. The Palestinians have a number of people with western education in their new cabinet.
Recently, someone found a way to trick google to manipulate pageranks. A lot of people who obsess over pagerank are upset because to them, the sky is falling. I'm amused -- they're silly to care so much. It's just a ranking on a search engine, and it's not like they're entitled to high rankings on it. Of course, some companies are available for hire that do dirty tricks to make pagerank higher for their clients, and they often promise better pageranks. That's what they get though, for offering something that's not theirs to promise.
Paul Graham has an interesting essay on Japanese versus American design philosophy. I think it's overall premise is correct, and wonder further if America will doom the world to its style in the name of capitalism. What room is there for pride and quality when everyone's obsessed with money?
The book Wicked by Gregory Maguire, came in from Amazon a few days ago. I'm about a quarter of the way into it, and it seems quite amusing.
Gay marrage continues to be fought, with the latest move in California. It's interesting that in the period of the most regressive political arena we've had for a long time, there are people who have the guts to push against them so strongly. I admire that. It's probably another sign of increasing polarization between the Two Americas we live in.
This is a cool idea -- embed cement dust in fabric, and you have an instant building when you need it. China is testing a vaccine for HIV.
Apparently, BushJr prefers Texas to DC for diplomacy.
Bobby Fischer evaded deportation to the United States by getting Icelandic citizenship as a gift. It's cool that the U.S. didn't get him for their stated purpose -- he played chess in a country the United States was boycotting because of the Cold War, but unfortunate that he's such a schmuck so we can't call it a overall happy story.
There's been a lot of fuss over some corpse that's being kept alive by machines in Florida. Politics being what they are, a single flatliner body gets a lot more attention than people who are unambiguously alive and soon to die elsewhere in the world. Just end the charade of life support, and give some of that attention to real people who need it! Geez!
Putin sometimes makes mistakes, like now. Sigh. I'm disappointed that the USSR didn't embrace glasnost and perestroika without falling apart, and even more disappointed that the selling of state assets instantly created a new capitalist class of plutocrats. Alas, that's what the business world wants.
Scientists found some dinosaur fleshy bits inside a bone. This is very cool!
You might enjoy this interview with Donahue.
One of the more difficult things about making a decision on Qatar is that I've had a lot of things happen at work and in my friendships recently that make me appreciate what I have here more. I've generally been leaning towards going, because with the way the financials work out there, I could come back and buy a house with the money I'd make, or otherwise feel quite secure, financially, but recently I've been less sure. A big part of me thinks that all this thinking about status and moving doesn't matter so much because building close personal connections to people might be more important than having these life experiences. Parts of me have a lot of wanderlust, and other parts really want to settle down. Sigh. I could make myself go, I know that much, or I could make myself stay -- nothing is set in stone. Perhaps I'll be more sure in time.
So, Outland is gone, but Columbus beckons. Time to head home and do laundry and get ready.
