Yesterday, I experienced that familiar feeling (maybe similar to sports fans watching the other team score a goal? Maybe - I'm not into watching sports) of seeing it go into status exception - they sent someone to Wean hall (where CS used to be), they found the closed mailroom, and sent it back to the local UPS centre. Last night they corrected the address (??) and it arrived this morning. Sadly, they were set to deliver the other package this morning, and it entered exception and would arrive tomorrow (but this is the SSD, so I'm trying to bend fate).

I called UPS, which offered to let me pick it up tonight, which is madly inconvenient (but I'll do it if there's no other option). The local UPS folk (which are even more friendly - seems their customer service people are pretty friendly, which is nice) took note that small packages should go to the GHC mailroom rather than to the old mailroom (so maybe I'm an invisible hero of CSD..) and is trying to contact the driver to have them try to deliver again today.

The thing that gets me is - how did they correct the delivery address to begin with, and why did they take it as a 302 instead of a 301? I guess dealing with stuff like this is why any non-tiny university tends to have its own US Post Office (and often zipcode). Maybe UPS/Fedex/the rest don't offer that kind of integration that the Post Office does?

Update: The awesome local UPS lady I spoke with managed to get them to redeliver it today, hooray!

Finished: Libson's book on Jewish and Islamic Law

It was a good book, although it ended rather abruptly - the notes section fills the last half of the book (I didn't know this until suddenly I hit the end in the middle). Like a lot of scholastic efforts that independently examine historical events with religious/philosophical significance, I wonder what the potential audience is for works of this kind - I imagine it might be rejected by followers of both mainstream Judaism and Islam because it could offend their dignity - people would like to believe that Shari'a is divine law from Allah, and likewise Halakha is the combination of laws of god and rabbinical fences around wrongful behaviour. The idea of mutual influence between the two systems during the early days of Islam in what is present-day Iraq is bound to step on a lot of toes (maybe serious independent scholarship always does) in two communities that are much more scholarly than all but a few flavours of modern Christianity. I wonder in general how scholars of these types interact with institutions that hold the relevant source materials - are these generally secular? If not, I could imagine reluctance to allow them access to materials that would help their possibly lightly heretical research.

Did more backstory for the webcomic-that-might-never-be-born - it's surprisingly enjoyable filling out details of a fictional university - a bit of research to find a suitable founder and tweaks to their history (in this case, I had Royal Governor Thomas Gage return to Mass with some of his family after the American Revolution and had him live a bit longer, long enough to found a University, bankrolled by one of his sons and some other financial schemes).

When I was young, I was considered a bright but lazy boy - when I was interested in a topic I tended to do rather well, but there were a lot of things in which I took no interest, and I would neither study them nor pay attention (I've gotten a bit better than this even though my work ethic still is still very off/on - no middle ground between a sprint and sitting around). History and geography were both in the "I consider that boring let's do something else" category - I think a lot of it was that my world-outlook didn't have a place to put that knowledge yet. What changed that for me was an interest in the humanities - the nature of humanity, laws, society, and a richer philosophy. With enough context (really contexts), history became fascinating, and geography became at least peripherally interesting because it's the stage for it all (plus modern visualisations from sat data make it pretty and virtually explorable). If I were to meet my younger self, I think in a few days worth of conversation I might be able to transmit the roots for the fascination back across that gap - if one can tie mundane events like a change in government (say, Oliver Cromwell's England) into theories of power, government, competing faiths, different notions of virtue, and have ideas for neat questions like "how do events like that affect diplomacy", and get in the habit for having ideas and questions like this hovering around whenever one thinks of history, it's hard to find it boring. I regret the opportunities I missed to dig into this stuff when I was younger (I don't really regret poor grades - missed opportunities kind of suck, but I'd rather make my own educational meal from academic sources and judge my own progress/goals than either have someone else judge them or try to go them alone (the latter is utterly absurd, really).

Earlier this week I managed to drag myself to a PittCFI meeting (first time) - it was a private meeting in some guy's apartment, and I think everyone there was at least 10-20 years older than me.. but it was pretty decent - a topic, a discussion group, all among very bright, well-read, culturally engaged people (yes, there was some informal singing of Tom Lehrer songs, discussion of films, etc). It happened at a high point in my social ok-ness, but if the stars align I might go back the next time they meet. Apparently there's this whole community I somehow never noticed during the many years I've been here.

With the turning of seasons, I'm starting to think about healthy living again - trying to cut back on unhealthy foods, and I'll probably start jogging again soon. If I can overcome the crazy, I really do want to lift anchor and move on soon to some magical happy land where the weather doesn't suck, I'll be able to make friends and find a suitable person to date, PRIVATE PART. Doing occasional work for my old group in psychology, I was reminded yesterday that I might be able to use some people I kind of know to get into a PhD program in Nederlands, neatly bypassing my non-glorious academic record with an entrance exam (abstract tests of intelligence have been the strong counterbalance to my academic record in opening doors for me).

The only real barrier is making sure that I want the lifestyle of endless meetings on neuropsych topics, writing grants, and dealing with university politics. I loved doing research, and I loved the idea of doing research, but what little I had to do of the other things were so very boring. It might just be the cost of working in the field, and apart from becoming some kind of dictator (which I honestly think I would be both good at in a serve-the-people kind of way and enjoy) or working at some awesome nonprofit, I don't think there are other things I could imagine seeing myself doing. I guess the will-I-keep-my-head-together thing is a question too, but it's one of those things where I'm so used to hedging my bets that it'd be a major shift to feel sure I want to go on, so this really wouldn't change that a lot. So yeah, it's stuff to think about - thinking hard about the academic lifestyle, and maybe a bit about other fields I'm interested in as well as nonprofits. I guess if I believed in Intellectual Property and actually had sufficient relevant skill I could become an independent artist or writer and enjoy that, but that's not going to happen.

Finally, a statement of a position on animal testing: I was inspired to talk about it by PZ Meyers' rather poor post on the topic. As is often unfortunately the case, he strawmans the topic in order to push for a reasonable articulation of his opinions. While animal liberation groups often involve people like he describes, there are many people in them who are reasoned, understand all the issues, and still both have the positions and approve actions to back it up. I often do (although I no longer do direct action).

For purposes of this, I limit my consideration of animal testing to be the use of mammals for testing of products, as well as abstract and applied academic research.

I hold that:

• Provided no harm is done to the animals either in the experiment/study or afterwards, and the animals are either returned to the wild (should they be wild animals) or to prospective pet owners after the study, testing is permissible. Otherwise:
• Animal testing for cosmetic or other nonscientific purposes should be prohibited
• Animal testing for scientific purposes that involves harm (including death, dissection, things that involve pain or discomfort, removal of limbs, infection with diseases that impact quality of life, etc) is strictly controlled - no non-reversable or excessively traumatic procedures are permitted for higher mammals, nor may a creature be designated for a significant portion of its life as a lab subject without care substantially similar to being a human companion appropriate for its species (or suitable contact with others of its species in a wild-like environment (e.g. car-zoo) for non-companionable species)

I further hold that:

• This is a moral issue, and all attempts should be made to place the above into both law and relevant professional standards
• Those who conduct research in violation of this are being immoral and are to be condemned and ideally shunned
• I do not condemn groups that would threaten, embarass, harass, protest, intimidate, call out, or interfere with experiments and testing that violate the above, provided that they do so in an appropriately targeted way (threats to violence for their family are inappropriate, and any direct action must be very carefully targetted) and are not themselves harmful to animal welfare (e.g. releasing animals onto streets). Done appropriately, I stand in solidarity with such actions, and will assume solidarity for groups that overall seem to do them

• I have no problems with people having pets, provided they're not abused or neglected
• If you have benefitted from the kind of research of which I disapprove, I don't blame you for having done so - one can't simply trade the knowledge back to undo the misdeeds.
• As is usually the case, direct action is a poor second to getting one's positions enacted in law, and should be used with the damage to rule of law and society's fabric in mind.
• Existing regulations in the scientific community are designed to create a "http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2010/02/time_to_get_mad_time_to_speak.phplesser ethical stance" which is adopted by the scientific community - they will commit misdeeds when they have no other option to get their information. This differs from the deepest forms of moral neglect as well as (very rare) actual sadism. Rhetoric and advocacy should be mindful of this difference, so as to make it reasonable to sway as many people as possible towards the deeper ethics presented here (philosophical disclaimer: my use of the word deeper here is position laden and not meant as a pretension of absolutism so much as a statement of my in-framework perspective)
• We should make it very clear that we both have the better ethics and that we fully understand the issue. We should correct those on our side when they're uneducated, and condemn them if necessary for improper action.
• We should be willing to debate and discuss the issues carefully and politely, and push for long-term systemic solutions and public opinion.

After a bit of research, I believe that ext4 supports the TRIM command, and that the alternatives (btrfs, zfs) are not reasonable alternatives, so I'll be installing on that.

Fedora 13 is going to be released soonish, but I don't really want to wait. I'll probably hop onto the Fedora Rawhide (a rolling version that always has alpha-level versions of all components) wagon until I can easily move onto a proper release. I wouldn't do this otherwise, but there are hardware-relevant (not just the SSD) changes that were made between Fedora12 and Fedora13 that I don't want to lose out on.

I will want to disable atime updates for files and directories to limit the number of small writes. I've recieved advice from people I reasonably respect suggesting I disable journaling, but I intend to ignore that - I believe I'd be losing out on data integrity if I did that. There are also some interesting tweaks for Postgres that I should do - I am still researching this.

I will likely move significant parts of my "media" volume off the disk, devoting my existing HD (in its new enclosure) for storage of that. I guess I don't need to always have Willy Wonka or Serial Experiments: Lain at my fingertips...

Hopefully the OCZ Agility series will prove to be reasonably decent.

Dinner, possible teahousitude, and then this geekery.... I guess it's at least a little different than my normal evening. The cats will probably be happy with even more time spent at home. :P]]> http://blog.dachte.org/pound/blog/dachte/entries/entry1267757441.html Seen on the moon Pat Gunn 2010-03-05T02:50:41Z Those into linguistics geekery who are a bit behind on their memes might like tonight's episode of Rocketboom.]]> http://blog.dachte.org/pound/blog/dachte/entries/entry1267821646.html SSD and F13 Pat Gunn 2010-03-05T20:40:46Z More unix/computer geekery - the results of the upgrade:

When I first started using computers, they didn't have hard drives, and so I learned the "wait profile" for floppy drives. There's a certain "pulse" to computers - most of the time when they fail and sometimes when they're doing something else, they change on one of the beats of that drum, and if they skip a beat, they often do something different. One can often tell when something's about to fail if one's learned this bit and knows how the song is supposed to go. When hard drives came along, I learned a different beat (I was still a little one when this changeover happened and we stopped using floppies for everything). SSDs, so far, seem to have yet another beat, and I seem to have lost a bit of precognition on my laptop.

I guess, having an OLPC, I technically should've been getting used to it then, but the OLPC is so doggedly slow and has such a weird interface that, like my ancient eMate300, I never learned its ins and outs.

Anyhow, the hardware upgrade went pretty smoothly - I've disassembled most systems I've had on my own, but HP provided a nice guide for HD replacement that I decided to follow for the lols. It's odd that they're such utter bastards for requiring a proprietary data cable to hook HDs in and a proprietary mounting bracket, and they still provide very nice guides for how to do it if you buy their horribly-priced adapters.

Unfortunately, the timing of the upgrade means I'm "testing" a version of Fedora that hasn't even hit alpha yet - I'm going to snarkily say it has Gentoo quality - QA has not looked at it yet, and it really shows. I think Fedora13 is set for its Alpha release in a week or so - several of the packages don't fit well together right now (some things segfault, I get a soft trap while I'm shutting down the system, and some of the alpha feature milestones are not met yet (not surprising...). Fedora's Alphas tend to be pretty good (even if a bit bumpy), so I imagine there will be a flurry of new package versions right before Alpha goes out that will fix most of the problems. The updates to the nouveau video driver work really well though, and the minorly off video/sound sync I saw before seems to be gone. The laptop LCD brightness controls don't seem to be working right, so my screen is a bit dark and not fixable. Lesson of the day is that stay away from software that hasn't even hit Alpha yet unless you have a really good reason.

Naturally, being less than 24 hours into a fresh system, I have a few weeks of settling into and tweaking to do..

Many years ago my mum gave me some nice (expensive) drawing things, which like many non-clothes things I promptly packed into a box and forgot about. I recently found some while cleaning my apartment; it's kind of goofy to discover things that've become useful in ones own long-term storage.

It turns out imagining (and sketching) younger versions of someone is very difficult - making it recognisably them but also recognisably younger is an exercise in brinksmanship and imagination.]]> http://blog.dachte.org/pound/blog/dachte/entries/entry1267849119.html Niggling Disasters Pat Gunn 2010-03-06T04:18:39Z Forgot to backup my mysql databases - lost all the work I did fleshing out the background for the webcomic... except that I oddly seem to remember most of the details. I'm also spending quality time grepping the raw device for the old HD (now in its enclosure) - I've repartitioned and put some new data onto it, but at least "grep" has found some relevant keywords that were only on the wiki, so perhaps with a bit of coaxing I can get the relevant pages back. On the upside, MediaWiki supports Postgres too now, so eventually I can look into ditching Mysql entirely on my laptop (w00t. I loathe MySQL).

I also found that my laptop exposes its brightness controls in /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness, so I can finally crank it up to something pleasant to read. Also, FC13 has Perl6, which .. would be great if the Perl Foundation would declare it done, publish the spec, and promote the hell out of it. Incompetent management of the rewrite has pretty much killed Perl though, and I don't expect them to develop a clue on that point anytime soon. Yeah, it's great to have a formal spec for the language, and the new design for Perl6 address a lot of the problems Perl has, but they've really managed to drop the ball in virtually every other way. Oh well, it's nice to finally have a "perl6" command even if it's not really released yet.

This promises to be another quiet weekend. I probably should've made plans to do something with someone, but that goes back into the wonderful circular thinking. I guess there are some cities I could visit despite not knowing anyone to visit, and .. there's ColumbusOhio too. Still... sigh. So much crap in my head and emptiness in my life. Upside: I have carrots, and the weirder of my two cats just stole one from the bag and will probably be eating it for the next hour or two.

Sciency people might find Stanfnord's The Energy Challenge and the Case for Fusion to be interesting.

I have come to think of base-10-unlimited plus a base60-pair as "microwave numbers". I wonder if there's a better term. Origin: when we type in 420 into a microwave, we mean 4 minutes 20 seconds, not 4.2 minutes nor 420 seconds. It's most interesting I think when the marker is removed.

I've been thinking about whether it's worthwhile trying to provide regular content on my Youtube channel, but it's puzzling what one might reasonably provide.

I sometimes wonder, when I hear people with neat ideas, when they stop talking about them if they've forgotten or shelved them - I tend to remember other people's ideas better than my own because I don't talk to people that often (and maybe they just have genuinely better ideas on average? I dunno). It seems like we all leave behind us a graveyard of good ideas... at least, the people who are in the habit of creative thought. I wonder what kind of social assistance technologies might help churn such ideas without relying on the relatively high attention that talklike interaction requires. ]]> http://blog.dachte.org/pound/blog/dachte/entries/entry1268027992.html In the Dork of the Night Pat Gunn 2010-03-08T05:59:52Z Remembered quip: Sysadmins are like bats - both are nocturnal creatures awake late in the night doing things you don't understand, often going "Eep eep eep!" .

Today: Felt too bummed to get out of bed until around 5pm, then grabbed some tasty syrian food from Taza21, then spent many hours at Kiva Channukah doing sketches for the webcomic-that-may-never-be (I may upload these). Left, and while waiting for the bus a fellow waiter was busting out rap to his iPod.. surprisingly, he wasn't bad and it straddled the line between irritating and cool. While starting laundry, I did a 25 minute video for youtube discussing some basic philosophy, thinking I might possibly make it a regular thing. Alas, youtube's option to switch into "Director mode" to allow for longer uploads no longer is offered (more precisely, it doesn't allow longer uploads anymore, although accounts that were already in that mode can still do big uploads). Oh well, so much for that idea. I'm not sure what to do with my 25 minute would-be upload. Google_irritation++

Mundane details and other mundanities: I managed to rescue all my wiki creative works thanks to brute force "grep the raw disk" methods. By the time it was done, I had already managed to fill much of it back in from memory, and now I have the task of merging the best of both versions. In some ways the new version was better - I filled in the details a bit differently. Sometimes destruction is the best inspiration for creativity.

Sketching reflections: I can't really manage drawing people's rumps. Getting the domensionality right for that part of the body is tricky (maybe partly because I haven't really ever paid much attention to the region?). Shoes are still pretty hit-or-miss, and with faces I can capture expression reasonably well (albeit maybe not very realistically) but I don't yet seem to have a way of making intended identities of people distinct. When I start to draw a face, it's not really a specific face, and it's like a 「random person generator」 was asked for its output. I also seem to do very badly with faces unless I start with the part of the eye socket on the outer outline of the skull- something about that spot is great for defining both the inner and outer features of the head, but it's hard to drop it down relative to an already established inner or outer feature. Anyhow, perhaps I'll eventually get to the point where people can recognise the bases for the people I sketch that are based on real people. Or perhaps not.

Incredibly irritated at how broken this pre-alpha fedora is - occasional full system hangs, soft kernel traps during every shutdown, broken apps. Also, broken dependencies. Sigh. To be expected, really.

Irritating to see people on OkC and think "wow, they'd be utterly perfect for me", but see they're in another city. I guess it's a close cousin to seeing someone IRL and learning enough to think that but have things utterly fail to work out. It's bizarre that this latest "dead centre everything looks perfect" one is in ColumbusOhio - I wonder if I had stuck around there if I might actually have tried to date her and if things might've worked out. I imagine a lot've things would've ended up differently had I stayed though. Still, this really seems like it would have been an exceptional match. Or maybe it's just wishful thinking on limited information. Who knows? I wonder if the people I knew in Columbus might even know her.

On that note, the more I hear about the tangled love relations in CMU, I wonder how much this Tom Lehrer song might be relevant. I sometimes (well, often) think it'd be interesting to date a Unix geek girl, although I should probably be reluctant to add that to the already monsterously long list of things I want in a date. :P

Oh, and for those who agree that Fiona Apple's 「Paper Bag」 is the most amazingly awesome music video, there's a cleaner upload of it than I've seen before.

I'm not much for TV, but the British show Psychoville looks fantastic. Kind of like 「the IT Crowd」, 「A Bit of Fry and Lawrie」, 「Mitchell and Webb Look」, 「Armstrong and Miller」, etc etc. Maybe if I lived in the UK I would actually watch TV. I guess we have MST3k and the Daily Show from the States.]]> http://blog.dachte.org/pound/blog/dachte/entries/entry1268083237.html Scannt Resources Pat Gunn 2010-03-08T21:20:37Z Sketches with a plot, extended:

• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Nine
• Ten

]]> http://blog.dachte.org/pound/blog/dachte/entries/entry1268150966.html Heir, A Parent Pat Gunn 2010-03-09T16:09:26Z CMU is always so empty this week. It's funny how much even not seeing acquaintances makes a difference - it reminds me of the occasional trips to NYC for Opera I make, sitting in my favourite places there watching people go by. It's not my idea of a good place to live, but NYC is a great place for self-reflection. I haven't been to Paris often enough to know for sure, but I get the sense it's good for that too, perhaps better. Maybe self-reflection doesn't adequately capture what I'm trying to get across - tragic emptiness? People-watching-with-envy? Isolation from grand flows? Farraday cage/Huis Clos? Different state of awakedness? I think maybe the last two - sleep and wakefulness is a big metaphor in my Weltanshauung - on one side of the coin I think being incredibly self-aware (in the way Zaphod Beeblebrox wasn't) makes one more awake than most people, on the other, withdrawl from everything and feelings of numbness represent a way to be more asleep than most.

Still trying not to be the kvetch-monster. It's probably a losing battle..

Amused that the US Census sent me a post telling me to keep an eye out for their next post. Good job! Also, the second best product on Amazon.com has acquired some awesome delivery options, including some clever person who for $2500 will hand-deliver the product and make a Tiramisu. Tempting!

I may have neglected to formally sign up for table space at the only conference I attend for work, which might mean no demo, which would make going there pretty pointless. *facepalm* This is a pretty big oops. I guess I'm hoping to leave vaguely soonish anyhow, but I don't like letting them down. Hopefully I can smoothe this out and snag space instead of cancelling.

Been wondering - communities that are big enough tend to attract trolls and nutjobs. In-person communities tend to attract people who are problamtic in other ways (the terribly unhygienic, people with particularly bad Aspergers, etc). It is desirable to remove such people from the community (often over the objections of people who object on principle to exclusion), or possibly to use threat of such to get people to mend their ways (if possible). Online, it's particularly challenging to do so - maybe if we had better cross-site-reputation-based systems (ideally those that allow reputation to be multifaceted, where a person might be highly trusted by one community or circle of friends (site boundaries might not coincide with this) and distrusted by another, having all this based on some mechanical consensus over community members that would give individual members their own stronger rules they might apply (e.g. I and Helen read/participate in the same forum. I'm part of a group of secularists. The group kinda-sorta trusts her so most people in the group see her posts as reasonably prominent, but I think she's a crazy troll so I see her posts as faded and small. My thoughts contribute to the group defaults and I am reminded of the group defaults (and my difference from them) somehow (so if my opinions greatly differ from the rest of the group, I feel it). We thus have reputation systems that are kind of like those in real life, reasonably scalable, and hopefully applicable to kill spam and isolate those who provide noise rather than signal.

The question is - is noise-signal distinguishable in principle or practice from ingroup-outgroup? I'd like, for example, to imagine that this system would just semi-mute messages from those who have not built a positive reputation, messages that provide mostly noise to a conversation, etc. Would people have the discipline to see it that way? Is the notion of trolling approachable/evaluable this way?

There are some cases where by tradition we (do or should) defer to topic-authorities for good reason - academia merits a high position in the pursuit of truth to the extent that people can reasonably believe that were they to study the topic to the point where they deeply understand it (maybe Masters degree) and can contribute meaningfully to it (PhD?), they would exist somewhere within the academic consensus on the matter (provided they didn't enter with preconceptions they're shielding - in the US, some evangelical young-earth-creationist groups have sent some people through biology programmes in order to get them the title needed to be a talking head against evolution, climate change, etc). Questioning academic consensus is not trolling, but taking a hard position against it when one lacks reasonable credentials can get near the borders (but then, the fact of having an intricate system does not self-validate its conclusions - astrology and a lot of philosophy falls into the "intricate but terrible" category - if a field is not "difficult and discriminating" we probably shouldn't trust it to be empirical) and might be a category of things we'd prefer not to see.

I think people are probably not well-equipped for having systems for things they want to see (or not) for different reasons - judgement on one tends to bleed-over into the rest (maybe this is instinctual? If we only have two "real" categories of Good and Bad and everything else is a bit unnatural..). I would expect that people who are careful might be able to regularly distinguish things they disagree with from things that are trolling (and recognise all 4 corners of the cross-table), but few people are actually that careful - on the internet sites where I used to spend some time moderating, where there was co-moderation I often saw people having systematic biases to keep things that either amused them or well-met their values, regardless of the rules of the site (likewise, attractive people get away with a lot more).

Maybe a sufficiently flexible reputation system might be able to nudge people in the right direction, just as many of society's institutions (and customs) seem to be ways of getting a bridle onto, productive labour out of, and rough instincts tamed in the human spirit. Getting it right would be hard, and no doubt those who consider the online world a way to dodge responsibility for their faults would greatly resent such a system - just as they felt escape from the disapproval their actions merit, the icy hand of society reaches into a new realm.. but it's necessary, I think. It gets a lot more interesting when the increased interconnectivity of modern times causes group-Weltanshauungen to split off rather than dissolve into the mainstream - it would be amusing (perhaps alarmist to think this way) if this were the thing that unravels modern civilisation.

A good argument might be made that appropriate behaviour is not a "stateless" matter - that there are circumstances where it might be appropriate, in the context of a discussion with a nutjob or a troll, to mock (even as in ideal conversation with sane people with whom we reasonably disagree that should probably never happen) - if we were to accept this (not sure I do), handling that context suitably wouldn't be easy. It'd be easy to segue this into a discussion of "reasonable is what a reasonable good-willed person does" versus "reasonable is" perspectives.

Oddity when considering faces: It feels like I have two "working storage areas" when parsing faces, one for males and one for females - when I remember the face of someone I know of one gender, I can hold in my head the face of someone with the other gender too, but I can't hold two people's faces at the same time if they're of the same gender. I know that I parse the faces of males and females differently (it requires a lot of effort, but I sometimes wonder what someone would look like if we were to imagine a version of them across the boundaries of sexual dimorphism - some people would look very ugly (often confirmed when one sees other members of their family where the family traits make one gender much better looking than the other). I know that I also parse faces differently based on age-category - I have not yet determined if I seem to have separate working storage areas for those too (that is, can I picture a male my age and a teenage male at the same time or not? no no I don't mean it that way at all). The process of changing what face within an area I remember feels like I'm morphing a generic template into a specific person (reusing the same bit of putty?) - even when I think back through memories, only one person per category seems to have a face at a time, and there's just a kind of blank placeholder on the others until I attend to them and it steals the face.

It would be creepytastic but maybe cool to imagine a play based around this where the actors all wear white masks over their face and have an oversized face-mask-on-a-stick they pass between themselves (decorating as appropriate) during scenes. ]]> http://blog.dachte.org/pound/blog/dachte/entries/entry1268253326.html Slinky Season Pat Gunn 2010-03-10T20:35:26Z Weather has scaled back from bitterly cold, past cold, and down to chilly. With adequate layering it's pretty nice to be outside. The huge piles of snow are looking increasingly lonely and misplaced. Mostly working for a coffeeshop today - it's nice to be nearer the fresh air. Conference situation resolved, I'm preparing/polishing a demo and chewing on a poster design. It's funny how much stuff is best done by background tasks in the mind - with active effort, I might create an ok poster over a brief period of devoted time, but if I just start chewing on it alongside all the other things I'm chewing on, the work gets done with very little direct time or devoted effort, and it gets done more creatively. I find the majority of the design part of programming to be best done that way too - with experience, one can avoid most of the pitfalls of "just do it" by having one's mind play with the possibilities in the background for long enough, so that implementation is usually a short implement/debug cycle. I'd bet being an author is like that too (not that I have direct experience); maybe thinking in general is best not done at a sprint.

On my way here I tried to go to Brueggers, but failed twice because I passed an old dude playing awesome woodwind instruments where SqHill's Panera's porch used to be. Very good music, but totally distracting - had to pull my meandering mind entirely to not walking right past Brueggers for a third time. I felt bad for the poor employees there who had to listen to elevator music, but maybe it's just as well - people using sharp knives to make custom orders of food for people might not need music of ultimate distraction.

I'm not sure if I'm glad or not that I didn't run into the old Hare Krishna I sometimes see in SqHill - those conversations tend to be long, and while they're often interesting, I'm also a bit weirded out that he keeps saying that I'm some kind of deeply spiritual being. Maybe he does that to everyone, or maybe it's that when we were talking about the way people should live their lives he liked hearing a perspective that a focus on wealth and posessions is a poor substitute for a focus on knowledge and human relationships. I don't think this really makes me spiritual (although the term is kind of fuzzy) - I don't mind being called spiritual, per se, but I don't like how it seems like it might be a misperception - that I feel like it'd lead me to disappoint him were we to talk more directly on philosophical materialism. I guess this kind of thing often comes up for people with an unlikely combination of identities/perspectives. He did invite and strongly encourage me to go to regular meetings of Hare Krishnas in people's homes he's involved with, but I politely demurred - that'd be a clear trip to awkward city given the wide gap of actual perspectives (even given some shared values). I'd generally be delighted to go to places as gaijin, to discuss from the outside differences and similarities, but to actually join communities of that sort , either muting myself on areas where I disagree or in people's homes he's involved with, but I politely demurred - that'd be a clear trip to awkward city given the wide gap of actual perspectives (even given some shared values). I'd generally be delighted to go to places as gaijin, to discuss from the outside differences and similarities, but to actually join communities of that sort , either muting myself on areas where I disagree or in people's homes he's involved with, but I politely demurred - that'd be a clear trip to awkward city given the wide gap of actual perspectives (even given some shared values). I'd generally be delighted to go to places as gaijin, to discuss from the outside differences and similarities, but to actually join communities of that sort , either muting myself on areas where I disagree or in people's homes he's involved with, but I politely demurred - that'd be a clear trip to awkward city given the wide gap of actual perspectives (even given some shared values). I'd generally be delighted to go to places as gaijin, to discuss from the outside differences and similarities, but to actually join communities of that sort , either muting myself on areas where I disagree or disrupting whatever they do normally wouldn't feel right. I used to have a JW come by once every two weeks or so on the weekend, and we'd hold polite discussions desipite our disagreements - he tossed religious arguments at me that I dismantled, I talked to him about philosophy and the wide variety of perspectives/philosophies on the nonreligious side of the line. Maybe having that difference provided the oyster's sand.

Still kind of stuck between trying to hop right into grad school, getting another academic job, or maybe even working in industry. I am amazingly good at indecision on very important life-direction things where the data doesn't really point in a single direction! Still, I think not going to Santa Barbara was probably a mistake, and not going to Qatar was probably another one. Maybe that'll help inspire me to break inertia - there's hardly enough land left here to stand on. Moving probably won't help, but there's nothing else left to do.

Interesting thinking about risks and learning - learning from mistakes is an important part of intelligence, but it's undesirable to "learn" from managed risks. In machine learning, there's a lot of interesting literature on the difference in formally understandable systems (how strong is our model for the world? What's the anticipated cost of collecting enough data to improve our model? etc), but in human behaviour, our instincts for this are terrible (on the gross-scale, maybe undesirable "learning from managed risks" is central to what "knee-jerk legislation" is. Some time back I wrote about the "leadership gene" - we could easily imagine a tribe of people in the past, led by a charismatic person of that sort (maybe with the face of David Cameron, whose policies I dislike but who I find immensely difficult to dislike); they'd see bold, decisive, stupid leadership that would be emotionally fulfilling in a universe that's reimagined however is convenient to both emotional realities and whatever seems to be the challenge at hand, accuracy be damned. I suppose unless we really can teach statistics at a young age (I had my first exposure in middle school in a 5-student class taught by the principal - I think this was both a step in the right direction and too timid a step - it's important to get in there before the instinctual framework that statistics replaces can be established), we'll never be able to get most people to the interesting substantive disagreements after the stupid common ones in most fields. The careful rejection of instinct where it fails is one of the principal tasks of civilisation. The person who can see the occasional hiccup in a well-running system and who investigates the foundations of the system impartially rather than demands it be torn down - this is the kind of person we should hope to produce in future generations - our feet should be comfortable on abstract ground.

To second-guess nature, I wonder what kind of an EEA might've produced beings with better basic reasoning skills than humanity - we might daydream about a big Rubik's cube in the sky, but .. maybe this kind of thing is one of the best arguments for transhumanist technologies - our brains just had to be "good enough" for the fuzzy process of selection to keep us, but now we'd like something better than evolution needed (I imagine the reason we don't have it now is that the actual benefit of a good statistical model is both heavily modern-worldview-dependent (that is, it requires philosophical materialism/naturalism to be particularly useful) and that it was of such marginal benefit in evolutionary times that it was drowned out by the reasonably large amount of noise present in selection).

To second-guess history, it'd be interesting to know how societies and histories would've worked out differently had we had this (for starters, I'd bet we'd see fewer casinos, ha ha ha).

As noted, I believe we can beat (with suitable education at the right age) our poor intuitive models out of ourselves, but to the extent that it's biological it'd be interesting to imagine tinkering with brain development so that it's naturally better - so the painful self-conquering (and kvetching of the defeated) that (yes yes, I bet you could predict that I'd bring us here) Freud described in 「Civilisation and its Discontents」 could be mitigated. Then again, if we survive long enough without editing it right out of our biology, maybe it'd be a suitable scar to help us keep some humility in whatever future we build for ourselves.

I think we can understand how people might consider this perspective to be alien to humanity, and why the dreams of the people (that Hollywood has honed in on) are so hostile to the scientist. The types of classical virtue that people have striven for since long before religions began to do the same (and then eventually claimed exclusive use of the idea) have always been hard - for secularists to reclaim that book in order to add new entries to it (yes, I do claim that some of this belongs in the field of virtue - it involves significant self-conquering, affects character, etc) might feel like an outrage to those who have managed to be the only ones talking about it for so long. There's a lot more to say on this front, but it's easily inferred from things I've probably said before about the costs of virtue.

For those who love playing with definitions, could we have a flavour of transhumanism that is entirely based off of education and notions of virtue, or is that just philosophy (or for the particularly snarky and historically blind, dystopia)?

I try not to be generally excitable about Google things - apart from their HR people (as well as a former boss (and maybe friendish) of mine) jerking me around, and their being a mostly advert-supported company, I'm nervous at how much gets built on top of their technologies and I'm not sure what we could replace if they decided to close everything tomorrow (e.g. there's all sorts of cool stuff people do with google maps - are there public alternatives to all that sat data they licence from the various companies? Do we need a company like Google to sponsor the basics like this, or is decentralisation possible that would let us break their (so far mostly unexercised) options to restrict or ad-embellish things)? Relying on them is dangerous to the extent that we have. That said, it's pretty cool that they now have bike trails in Google Maps and let people get separate walking and biking directions to places (thanks to jwz for pointing it out). Although entering that mode takes one to San Francisco, it seems to know plenty of Pittsburgh trails too.

Just to top off this scatterbrained post (think of this as a cherry?)

Quote of the day:

• "Superiour pilots uses their superior judgment to avoid needing to exercise their superiour skill"