Will of the People

Recently was curious about a song performed by the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo in the Richard Elfman film 「Forbidden Zone」. ( Read more... )

More pushing of cars: more falling down into freezing puddles. Doing that a few times suggests "Damnit, I want a cupcake!" - I wonder how much business Dozens made from that precise kind of thing today.

Been playing a bit more with some stories I've been tempted to make webcomics/fantasyblogs out of. The most recent story I've been fleshing out is set a few hundred years before the setting of one of my experiments in fiction-blogging, in the near future.( Read more... )

I think, provided that I can hold myself together until then, I should finish up my major projects at work (maybe another 5-6 months left) and lift anchor. I'm not entirely certain about it, but things have failed to come together here and I think I need a new place where I can start over again without the baggage of having alienated so many people. The where and how of what's next are not clear, although ideally it'll be someplace with less soul-sucking winters, without a terrible male-female ratio, with a tradition of intellectualism, and where I can get a good university job until I figure out what's really next.

CMU fans might find this kind of neat.

Sudden snowstorm => helping people push cars around SqHill.( Read more... )

• The Khan Academy is an organisation that puts high quality basic science education videos on Youtube. This is an interview with the founder.
• Daniel Pink's talk at Google on human motivation is very interesting - it ties to gift economies, how employment works, and creativity
• Disappointed that Wikileaks may have puttered out for lack of funding. It's not a big surprise to see it die this way - like many "internet culture" entities, its weakness is funding, primarily I think not in HR costs, but more bandwidth and server space. It would be interesting to see what kinds of things would flourish if disk space and cycles were free and IP regulation were gone. Addressing the former, could something like the NEA inexpensively provide that kind of thing (assuming politics were no barrier and everyone agreed it to be a good thing to do)? Could it be done without adverts, using something akin to the "student activity fee" that universities have to encourage student organisations to form? I pay a certain amount of money every month for my server (dachte.org), using it as a place to get my mail, run my website, host my blog, and occasionally do projects. If I had the bandwidth and speed to do more, would I? Maybe. It would certainly be nice if things that are much more worthy, like Wikileaks, didn't have to spend money on things like hosting and costs of that kind of thing were just absorbed by society at large. Although.. perhaps Wikileaks is distinct in that it needs to be uniquely isolated from the laws of the countries where it's socially active. Any whistleblower site that has the ability to embarass governments and very powerful people (as Wikileaks has) might be better placed elsewhere, or otherwise effectively hard-to-reach by law enforcement. It's probably as big of a target as the anon.penet.fi remailer was (which I occasionally used, way back when).

In theory, making myself try to be social today was a victory, but it was most unsatisfying and a failure. Sigh. I don't know what to do.

Tonight I learned about the big brother of the history substitution operator in bash.( Read more... )

I may have badly mismanaged time at work, and I'm a bit worried about it. I thought a certain task was significantly smaller than it was, and only noticed when I was deploying it that there's a lot of other tricky stuff I was supposed to do too - If I had known this I would have said "no" or delayed a lot of other things that needed doing. Sigh. My productivity is a lot lower than it should be for various reasons anyhow. I might need to do a lot of marathon software design/programming to avoid people getting upset.

I sometimes wonder what my life would've been like if I had been successful at flirting with some of the people I tried to flirt with in the years since my last gf. ( Read more... )

Incomplete rambling about technocrat-ism snipped.
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Bleh, politics.( Read more... )

This winter:( Read more... )

I am not a graphics-editing wizard. Click on the image for larger evidence of this.

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In other news, I think Elizabeth Warren is one of my favourite nonelected government figures. Just like Lawrence Lessig (who is not a government official in any way, but who is also a law school prof), she's a law professor working to shape government for the interests of society. While I'm considerably to the left of either of them, I have a lot of respect for both of them. On that note, Lawrence Lessig is trying to get people talking about a 28th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, focusing on shortcomings in our electoral system and how influence can be bought.

I'm not easily interested or impressed by jock-type things, to put it mildly. National Geographic somehow manages to provide a programme that I would happily watch alongside people who are very different from me. This, called "Fight Science", goes into the physics of martial arts and is beyond awesome. It's about an hour and a half, so be prepared to devote some time for it (or download it).

(around the 1 hour mark, they discuss the Bõ, which was my favourite weapon when I was learning some flavour of kenpo, ages ago - I would've happily just learned Bõ and skipped or skimped on the rest - they show a really interesting 3-part staff after that)

Evening steeped in utter routine - work, teahouse, home. Perhaps something novel, perhaps something I've said before in another way.

I wonder, given our suceptability to branding, whether tribal humanity used tattoos to distinguish tribe from tribe. ( Read more... )

PZ points our attention at Irving Kristol on political truths. Kristol believes in the "hard" type of propoganda, where society has various narratives for people of various levels of political sophistication - these narratives are tailored for their audience, in the name of political stability. ( Read more... )

A recent edition of the ISR had a refreshingly honest account of the (very tenuous) connection between Marxism and feminism. I am tempted to say that Marxism more can be "made compatible" with feminism (in the same way that Sarte in his later years made existentialism compatible with marxism, tinkering with suppositions of both to create an intellectual enterprise that coherently melded the traditions and values of both) than that they're naturally compatible. I'm comfortable maintaining my high score on the BS-filter for any social studies paper that references socialist theory in the context of gender/queer/feminist/$race studies.

Interesting task - reconstruction of Haitian infrastructure. I don't envy Préval, but he has a very interesting task ahead. Likewise for those trying to use reconciliation to pass the Health Care bill (frankly, I would rather a more aggressive, stronger bill that would just get 51%, and simply ram it through by letting Republicans filibuster for as long as they like (months, if needed), locking up congress and letting public pressure build on them until some small sacrifice can seal the deal). It's not pretty, but it's bloody stupid to let threat of a filibuster undermine a major initiative by a party in clear and large majority - extensive threat of this might reasonably lead to the end of our democracy, as parties might prove unwilling to ever let *anything* pass without a 60% majority.

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In more than one area of my life, I've taken what might be a radical position by some standards. I try not to be too in-your-face about this with people I know - it's not that I wouldn't be pleased if people found my conclusions or my reasoning good, but rather that with my other leg, I have a second position. That second position is one which is less specific than my actual position, less radical, safer, and one to which I either might retreat to if I must or feel more comfortable moving other people towards. I consider the "other leg" a "good opponent" in discussions, a "virtuous without being devoted", and a reasonable thing to move others towards without making them the radical that I am (and hey, if they happen to come to my radicalism for good reasons, I'd be happy).

I am an atheist.( Read more... )

I am a socialist( Read more... )

I am (or at least was) a radical environmentalist and remain one of the "mental space" anti-advert, anti-consumerism lot( Read more... )

I think part of it is also that I'm afraid of manipulating people, or afraid of converting them, or even afraid of the burdens of being respected - if they begin to respect me, or change their beliefs because of me, I'd feel obligations coming from that, I'd feel that if I have some other radical ideas that they see for the first time their (possibly fragile) belief in whatever they've come to see might come apart, etc. Maybe I'm more comfortable with good opponents or companions anyhow - there have been a few times in my life (not many) when people read some things I had written and came up to express admiration - few things invoked such horror in me as that (certainly a horror I didn't understand until I had the time to prod at it - still not sure I do entirely). The last thing one should want is groupies when one is trying to inspire the whole world to deep, careful thought (even if one can only provide a tiny amount of such inspiration to a very small number of people). I guess it's not really much of a problem anymore (maybe it's because of emotional breakdowns, or maybe it's because my arguments are for a different philosophy than they used to be, or maybe it's because seeing me in person for more than a few seconds is a very rare event for anyone who might possibly be interested in these things)

Unrelated, I am slightly surprised that Wean hall is closed right now because of a bomb threat. Oh well, off to Crêpes!

I was going to sketch my general intuitions for how people can keep wikis and other "new media" working socially.. might yet do that. I might also post a newer version of my OpenVPN-manager - substantial improvements since last week's tarball. I'm not sure if anyone is interested in such things though - I don't think there were downloads apart from search engines. Little point in posting it if, like the webcomic I posted for awhile, I'm the only one who cares :P

What barriers are there (either technological or infrastructure) that prevent all the devices you use in a regular day from converging into a single device? How did this differ from 10 years ago? How much stuff do you own that would be replaced by such a convergence? What is the relationship between such broad economic transitions and our economic problems? If we want to keep reasonably similar levels of lack-of-central-control, how might we (legislatively, otherwise) shape the transition to preserve it? Do the technology changes make the current form of that lack of control sustainable post-transition?

As for me, I would be very happy to get rid of all my DVDs and books if I had open, digitised and annotatable versions of all the content in each, without DRM. It would free up considerable space in my apartment.

Not closely related, it'd be really interesting to see people stand up en masse for ethical structures ( Read more... )

Prompted by watching my cats snuggling, I wonder if they would actually be buddies were I to have dozens of cats - is their closeness just because apart from me, they have no options for company? Perhaps they would have a different best friend were they to have more options. It's the same way with friends, acquantences, and romantic partners - one could always imagine a much larger world that had someone better than the one one has chosen, but circumstances conspire to give one those one has. This inspires discomfort, and is rarely spoken aloud, probably because just as we would like to imagine we're special in the universe, we like to imagine that our relationships (being central to a happy life) are just as special, and it feels disrespectful to visit too bluntly the idea that were one to have met someone better-matched, the building of memories and tightening of life-orbits to make one's actual relationship awesome would not have happened. To hide this potential further, the religious have the option to say that their god(s) have willed the relationship (perhaps those old enough to have a divorce no longer are prone to such fluffy ideas - the divorcee seeking romance is like many atheists, less prone to feelings of invented levels of deep significance, even if they hope for (what I think relationship ideal should be) an intimate, hopefully lifelong life-partner. So long as we have the energy to seek them out, the connections we make are shaped by what connections are available. A bit more broadly, practically all of our life is fragile like this - feelings of destiny are a way to cope with the terror this brings - to paint a story over the terror of a universe that does not care,

In each of my three romantic relationships, ( Read more... )

Amusement: Tortfeasor (larger cat) has seen me put my hat on, and so he's anxious and attentive because he knows I'm about to leave. Pets are a kind of guaranteed (but limited) friend, an artificial form of the natural processes above.

"It's better to have loved and to have lost, than to listen to an album by Olivia Newton-John" -- Red Dwarf

Is the "no frills, be clear and concise" style advocated by Strunk compatible with:

• The hope for deep recall, made by linking a concept or memory to as many different other memories or concepts as possible? (by this, Žižek should be the easiest philosopher on eartth to remember!)
• Efforts to preserve meaning across the ages (e.g. if we were to write the Quran, knowing that subtleties of meaning are difficult but a number of very clever people will create schools of litereary analysis dedicated to try to pull as much meaning as possible from one's work)
• Conveyance of the level of ease the author has with the particular ideas being expressed

As I may have mentioned before, I have a very tough time reading Hegel, and I've never been sure whether this is because I'm not smart enough, because I am not patient enough, because I lack enough background to understand the concepts (or started reading his works in the wrong place), because the translations are bad, or because it's a bunch of bs (even if Ego pushes me towards the last conclusion, it may very well be one of the first two). Could Hegel be Strunked? Is the complexity of his writing essential complexity? Perhaps even if it is, it's of the sort that one could create a "junior" version that misses a lot of the subtleties that'd be appropriate for reading a few times before one starts on the real thing? (Note: Would be interesting to have a word for classes of works that are amenable to such treatment - 「Juniorisable」? 「Demoable」?)

Stepping back a bit, I am unsure of the proper scope of Strunk, but hearing a long discussion on him in a group meeting (networking research group which I'm kinda-sorta associated with) at CMU that I happened to attend got me thinking about this. I'm not sure if one can make a principled distinction between the purported scope of sentence-level writing philosophy and paragraph/paper level, in that the broad writing philosophy might entail sentence-level decisions that are nonstrunkian.

Close cousin to ontological argument: "Can you imagine a being with the ability to transition out of imagining into reality?"

In any online community where there are rules and some way, official or not, honest or not, for users to help enforce or support those rules, a community will form to do so provided there is reasonable consensus that the rules are actually for the public good. This will often happen even if there is no direct benefit to those who do so (no rewards, no recognition, etc). Likewise, there will usually appear a much smaller group of people who are opposed to rules who will either rules-lawyer or (as the preacher in the following link does) be a nutjob. (To be careful with scope - sometimes particular rules don't make sense, and supporting those rules can be quite a bad thing). There's something nice about seeing spontaneous, relatively-low-ego communities form in support of good things.

Some time ago on my website, I started to categorise fallacies of human thought, ( Read more... )

The IEET (specifically, J Hughes) has some interesting articles on Transhumanism and philosophy, although he mainly sketches the issues without saying anything. Still, it could stir some interesting conversations. So far, three bits have been published:

• いち
• に
• さん

The last of which would be a great start to a discussion on methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism.

Projects for work that are opensource - w00t. I thus present to readers and solicit code comments on a very early (just made it past bare functionality) version of MetaVPN, a manager that creates and configures OpenVPN instances. This is intended for people who need the ability to manage multiple dynamic instances of OpenVPN, or otherwise need to frequently make and destroy instances but don't want to manually go through the configuration process.( Read more... )

Interestingly, I don't think I was ever taught the Whitesmiths code formatting style (although it's hard for me to say for sure, as I learned C such a long time ago after learning BASIC, Assembly, and Logo) - there are a small number of simple/obvious indent styles possible, after which one gets deeply ideosyncratic (and the marginally customised versions generally tend to fall under the umbrella of a major style - my Whitesmiths style is coloured by the many languages I've learned). Are there great undiscovered families of code formatting that are still coherent and reasonably simple (and compatible with C-descendent languages)? I am amused that for me, language barriers are smaller than code formatting barriers - I am willing to learn, use and be inspired by new languages, but not if they prevent me from using Whitesmiths (and if they're too pushy about formatting, I lose interest in them regardless of their other merits).

I tend to take showers in the dark, closing the bathroom door and turning out the lights, as a way to relax, and also as a designated slice of time to think about more abstract things (not that I really need designation). I've been chewing (maybe written about this before) about programming in the abstract, and how one might make programming langugages or language representation for blind people. What are the essential features of programming (recursion, variable naming, methods, etc), and how visual a task is programming. Could auditory languages or auditory explorations of program structure be done? (we think of vision as a "precise sense" and hearing as a fuzzy one, but could we change how we hear in this regard? Visually, we might have a tough time telling the difference between two blocks of code because our eyes glide over it, but if we really manage our attention we can see it. Are there limits to that latter capability for hearing? I partly think about these things because I imagine people who enjoy programming really losing a lot by going blind, and partly because it helps one step back and understand the mental processes behind the stylised encoding of meaning that is programming.

Seeing all the good coverage of the disaster in Haiti is an excellent way to make one feel helpless. Donating is one thing, but if there were some way to know I'd be helpful, I wish I could pack a backpack and sleeping bag and take a few weeks off to head down there to help do whatever's needed (not speaking the language would be a major barrier). The death tolls are nearing 100,000 according to the news.. The effective lack of a government the country has had for several years continue to complicate repair efforts.

Britain has banned theocratic group Islam4UK, ( Read more... )

It's a bit weird seeing these kinds of discussions from the Whitehouse on Youtube - reminds me of the lively discussions in the software engineering classes I took in undergrad.

Probably the best way to understand Ahmadinejad's standing in Iran right now is to say that it's a bit worse than BushJr's, but about as polarising.

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A bit irritated with both my laptop and my desktop's sound cards for making different (soft) noises based on CPU usage or disk usage. I guess this could be because modern soundcards are lousy and do things in software that they really should do in hardware, but perhaps it's just interference.

Recently have been exploring the different Pestos that Whole Foods has to offer.

It's always a bit awkward to say farewell to a friend or acquaintence for the last time.( Read more... )

Finally I have learned the name for a nice, schmaltzy genre of music that I've enjoyed since I was fairly young. Two songs kind of caught my young ear - Weird Al's 「This is the Life」, and TMBG's 「Rhythm Section Want Ad」 (actually, both of these might be more in close orbit around the genre than properly inside it). Now that I know the genre is named "Hokum", I'm able to find the centre of the genre, and it is glorious. This is not quite as good when I discovered the words 「Klezmer」 or 「Flamenco」 (both of which were just had for the asking when I asked my father "what genre of music is it you're listening to?" - for being an immoral contrarian schmuck, he at least played in a lot of the same mental worlds I live in, with similarly eclectic tastes), but it is good stuff. I am tempted to say that one of the masterpieces of videogame music, the 「Mystic Cave」 theme from 「Sonic the Hedgehog 2」, probably is also in reasonably close orbit around Hokum.

My cats will probably be amused to see me slightly less mopy and depressed for a bit, as unlike Klezmer and Flamenco (or closer cousin, Ragtime, on which I was raised almost as much as classical music), Hokum practically demands that one dance, and that that dancing be extremely silly.