Will of the People

"Start of a flood..", thick rain, sudden wind, branches flying through the air. "The coffeeshop will be open late" was announced, as nobody wanted to brave the outdoors with this. He glanced at his hands, tips yellow from smoking imaginary cigarettes, the smoke rising around him, reflected in his eyes alone. A wicked smile flashes on his face for the audience, returns to a blank look an instant later so the others don't see as they alternatively marvel and fuss with their cellphones. Somehow the rain and the company create a temporary traction that reminds him of long ago. "Perhaps this is the end of something", he thinks - moments later a low wave of water carrying cigarette butts more real than his and other depress washes across the street, less deeply across the sidewalk. A small spurt enters the doors that were never designed to come to a complete close - a feeling of closure is enough for most people. Among the others, a few are delighted, the change in schedule reviving old memories of school being cancelled due to weather - appointments cancelled, nature provides a spectacle - simultaneous blame as street rubbish is called to move again and celebration as destructive urges are given vicarious satisfaction. The one employee is not sure if he's being tortured or given relief as tonight's later unpleasant task he's given himself is delayed. "Perhaps it's more time think about it", as he figures out how many more cups to leave out and what to clean.. "What the hell, drinks are on the house", he announces, turns to go get the mop to push the water back outside and hopes the wind doesn't break the windows. The power flickered, and somewhere in the distance a car alarm started..

From a recent conversation, paraphrased:

"Do you consider yourself more of a nerd or a geek?

• Hmm. A geek.
• Then MIT would be better than Harvard.

Amusing how short conversations show that the cloud of (sometimes-separate, sometimes overlapping) definitions one has can differ from someone else's, and also how such a short definition can add a new member to that cloud. Memes in action!

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Hmm. I have not climbed in too long.

Ultra-simple Veggie Halfwich recipe:( Read more... )

I've been feeling rather lousy recently, but when things arn't so bad I've been doing some work on my blog software.( Read more... )

Early next month, Rage of the Stage (a local alternative theatre group) is doing an interpretation of the Rocky Horror Show, which should be interesting (their theatre being in an old warehouse in the southside, I'll actually be able to attend without twisting arms, unlike the local RHPS).

I am toying with the idea of adding some "transforms" into my mail client to remove advertisements inside messages before I see them. On some level I'm still mystified that people use mailing lists and other community sites that stick adverts into everything, and there's something weird about the idea of a world where we accept the idea of allowing things nobody wants to see to be given a "fair shot" at reaching eyes of people in exchange for them being given a service, with the more technically sophisticated of those people then using software to hide it anyway. This kind of ties in to how we percieve Google, Yahoo, and some other sites - companies that have a primary stream of revenue doing evil while being otherwise reasonably good (use of the term evil here is lightly tongue-in-cheek). Thank goodness for greasemonkey and other things that let us avoid this stuff.

Also pondering: general issues with asymmetry in broader-term relationships.. can relationships be stable given an expectation of sustained asymmetry?

Like the well known quote, but folded back: applying non rule-based aesthetics to something often (mis?)associated with rule-based aesthetics: Attractiveness of Numbers:( Read more... )

I took a nice jog tonight in deep darkness.

Recently I've been a bit obsessed with the wonderful voice of Orson Welles. For the real stuff, archive.org has the full "War of the Worlds" broadcasts online for free download (caution: Does not actually have lots of Welles). I learned that Maurice LaMarche (a comedian) gave the impression of Welles for many cartoons I've liked (the Critic, Pinky and the Brain (Brain had Welles's voice), Freakazoid) but his comic acts are irritating beyond belief. Tangentally related, a comic that I do like, Norman Lovett (played Holly in Red Dwarf) has very amusing episodes online of various things he's been in/written.

News-y and other short stuff:( Read more... )

Also, a random personal opinion: purses are very ugly/unsexy. Backpacks and computer bags both say much more awesome things about a person than a purse.. even a fanny pack/bum bag is better. I'm not sure if many other people are with me on this æsthetic judgement though...

Musings I had on work and values recently when I was too depressed to blog:( Read more... )

Strong crushes that don't want to go away and don't get fulfilled suck. I still have 3 that float around when my head isn't looking right at the ground. Damn.

Rereading Wolfram's "New Kind of Science", courtesy being given Gustavo's copy as he prepares to leave town. It's LOLtastic, alhough one gets the impression, given enough of a background on Philosophy of Science, that there are some interesting ideas buried behind the grandiose claims/interpretations and terribly kooky presentation. It is possible that changes in the process and culture of science could lead to the Institution of Science in global society doing a better job, and that there is a reluctance to adopt certain kinds of models - we might consider the adoption of and integration of statistical reasoning into science as an analogy of a past shift across different fields (perhaps we can even imagine a philosophical "camp" lightly parallel to intuitionists in mathematics that would refuse to accept most or all statistical reasoning as valid). It would be interesting to imagine under what kind of a forum such shifts/philosophy could be discussed - it would pair naturally (like a wine) with general discussion on what is accepted as valid science in each discipline and what journals of specific sciences demand (either through the editors or "enforced" through peer-review) of those who would publish.

Dotfiles.org looks pretty cool.

The X Window System (used on several modern unixes, including Linux) has something similar to the MS-Windows "Mousekeys" feature built in (part of something called AccessX). This lets you control the mouse cursor and generate clicks using the numeric keypad instead of the mouse.( Read more... )

When I was first given the film Twelve Monkees (on DVD), I really disliked it. With repeated viewing.. I've come to like it. I read that it's based off of a French short film called "La Jetée". Perhaps that's worth seeing as well.

Rereading collection of Isaiah Berlin's essays, read his summary of Johann Herder's ideas - would both like to offer an alternative not presented and understand whether it's presented accurately.

Two links:

• First, there's a game called Echochrome that looks particularly awesome - it reminds me a bit of a philosophical curiosity - would a universe where the laws of physics are very different in fundamental ways be plausible? Unfortunately, I don't have a gaming system capable of running echochrome (seems to be a sony-only game). Oh well. It's neat to see clever games like this - I am lightly inclined to categorise it with Portal.
• University of Maryland has a Gamer Symphony Orchestra... with downloadable mp3s of their performances. They have pretty good taste in what songs they do - very little of games I haven't played (like Halo) and lots of good old stuff.

Some news/issues/etc:( Read more... )

I am kind of amused to realise that for book-RPGs, anyone who's been a GM/DM for long enough and is reasonably skilled in the art could regenerate the entire game from memory (even if the regenerated version has some differences). I suppose the same thing could go for a fair set of board games - inside all our heads are templates for so many games. Do we really need the boards and rules for all these things? Do we even need the (plentiful) websites where one can get PDFs of all of these? Perhaps it would be more interesting if people routinely regenerated games from memory, making new boards and stuff (easier for symmetrical games like Monopoly than asymmetrical ones like Axis and Allies -- balance issues).

For those really bored, I re-sync'd my website with my development version a few days ago.

Last night's trip to migraine-land was very special. I probably should've skipped the souvenir shop there.

Assorted thoughts on the debate over female priests in Christianity (with possibly some additional thoughts on non-straight priests as well):( Read more... )

I have finally figured out what makes mplayer occasionally hose my terminal (the "reset" command usually fixes this) -- sending it a control-N, after complaining that I don't have anything bound to that key, it displays a character it shouldn't and nothing's good after then. This does not happen with a normal xterm, so I'm going to guess that it has something to do with the (good) unicode support in gnome-terminal (perhaps relating to why ircII runs best from an xterm). If I ever want to spend a day digging through the sources for ncurses, mplayer, gnome-terminal, and xterm, I suppose I could figure out exactly what's going on.

I recently heard some music from the hiphop group "La Coka Nostra" (notable in that it pulls together all the people from "House of Pain" back into the same band). They're only moderately good - better than Eminem but not as good as what House of Pain was.

"No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches." -- Milan Kundera

A collage of webcomics I read (focused on characters when possible, click for bigger version):

"Those who seek new virtues, clothe themselves in new garments, live with new norms, musts and mustn'ts should never expect a home they do not build"

Another quiet day, except while trying to figure out where I wanted to eat, I wandered by a nice guy I've seen all over town collecting money for children's charities (one of the few times I've given money to a collector rather than through some mail/online form has been through him). We chatted for a bit, and eventually I found out that he's a Hare Krishna and spent several years in a monestary in India practicing. Floatng around discussions of values and conclusions we have in common (which are considerable), we talked for about an hour and he gave me a Hare Krishna version of the Bhavagad Gita. ( Read more... )

Sometimes I wonder if a very inward-directed thinker could be at peace in almost any nation or system, no matter how repressive. Phrases like "If you're not furious at the state of the world today, you're not paying attention" versus the discrimination between Bohdisattva and those who pass go... Still, could people achieve that kind of peace that even under Idi Amin or a similarly bad government, they could be so little affected by the world's challenges and pain that it would not poison them?

This copy of the Bhagavad Gita is shaped differently than my other copy - just like Rashi provides a lot of context to Torah (that one might or might not accept as being necessarily following from the text), this edition serves to paint Krishna's centrality in worship in a way that other Hindu versions do not. Interestingly, from the conversation, apparently many Hare Krishnas see Hindus as "other", although from the outside they're grouped as being within the Hindu cloud (vision: a moon dancing near its parent's Roche Limit... also, falling in resembles hitting an event horizon... Hinduism as a Singularity)

I recently dragged my IBM PC out of the closet and put it on my desk - it may seem silly, but looking at it gives me warm fuzzies (if I can find the right cables, I'll have to see if it still can boot - I think somewhere I might have some of the old basic games I wrote on it when I was 6 or 7 - it'd be a hoot to see them running again).

I woke up this morning with a few questions on SVDs( Read more... )

Slashdot recently reported the beginnings of interoperability between Second Life and open servers speaking the same protocol - that opens a number of interesting issues like preservation of the IP regime that SL has on its grid. ( Read more... )

It says good things about humanity that as of this look, 819 people need their daily-ish dose of amusing nonsense. Merovingan's lj would probably be a good thing to read for people who for some reason never were going to sleep again. If I remember correctly, I first found him when reading up on a few other prominent Wikipedia admins. (which reminds me - is Eric Möller still involved at the highest levels of Wikipedia? .. answer: sigh, yes he is.)

I find it very frustrating how many news sites don't "get it" with the internet - when they report on things that pertain to things online, very few of them provide a direct link to anything the user might want to follow up on. For example, a news site might run a story on a new piece of software from FooCompany that's going to change the world, and while they're often will link to other stories they wrote about FooCompany and possibly the type of software it is, they almost never will link directoy to FooCompany or a press release. Traditional news media almost never get it right, which is probably why a lot of people get their news (for better or for worse) from slashdot, kuro5hin, or Wikinews.

Pondering the phonomena of discussions with other people where certain styles of argument cause a statement/point to have no impact because one has decided that style of argument is invalid. ( Read more... )

Much of this is indirectly inspired by a rare bit of socialising tonight, which touched on philosophy, math, programming languages, and other things. This kind of thing happens far too rarely.

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I'm happy to see that Megaman 9 will be coming out soon (which, from the previews available on Youtube, mixes old-style graphics with a lot of new gameplay ideas), but stumbled across this video of someone beating all the Megaman 1 bosses without getting hit (and without using the select-pause trick), mostly using the regular arm cannon. Impressive! (there's also a lot of other weird stuff for those looking for it)

It turns out that the sleek from taja21 is closer to authentic sleek - it does not use spinach. So, as much as I would've liked to like it more, Med Grill's sleek is better. Oh well.

I was a little bit bothered to see a major bug with livejournal - the lj_latest RSS feed does not only sample public entries. As I may have mentioned, I use jwz's xscreensaver with the bundled script to use that feed for all text (meaning random livejournal stuff is always flowing by on my TV), and I've modified it to log everything that goes by because more than once I've spotted something interesting I'd like to read at my leisure and wanted to know which journal it came from. Today I noticed that one of these posts was on a journal that when I visited it with a browser, all it had visible was one of those "I have everything friends-only" posts, posted several months ago. A little bit more prodding around showed that this situation isn't super rare (so it can't be chalked up to them posting something and then realising that "oh, it isn't hidden like every other entry" and locking it after my screensaver snagged it from the feed). In theory, some really interested third party could sample the latest posts feed at great frequency (maybe through tor or some other similar service) to .. hmm. Maybe it's not possible to exploit easily, but it's still a bug. There are a few other bugs you might notice about LJ - if someone has you friended but has some posts restricted to a group that doesn't include you, you can see that the posts exist (even if you can't get any more information about said posts) by looking at a calendar view for their journal.... and.. so on. If you're sufficiently clever in the right way, you'll find a few more interesting bugs :)

I particularly like Isaiah Berlin's essay "The Pursuit of Ideal" - it's not a long essay, but it provides a compelling argument that much of traditional political philosophy is dishonest and harmful in attempts to establish systems that are too "order"-centric. I think the type of idealism and order he speaks of is almost orthoganal to the styles/intuitions people have about moral philosophy, as well as belonging more to metavalues than values... I'd love to provide a link here for people to read it, but that essay in particular has not been published yet in a free form.

Last night: talked more with redacted about remote work of various kinds, salary, yaddayadda, as well as specifics of what this company/project is and events with it. Like most private-sector jobs, I can't say it really helps society in an interesting way (nor does it really hurt it), but it's still a cute idea in some sense.

Tonight: dinner at Alladin's. Afterwards, while I was thinking about tea at the 61c and heading that way while I decided, I came across the new Mediterranean place that opened today, replacing Turquoise (a turkish mart that closed a few months ago). Taza21 has sleek, which I grabbed to go. I'm thinking about taking it out to Schenley park sometime later tonight - there are a few benches under all-night "street"lights in the middle of nowhere that I sometimes visit for late-night picnics and reading. I think a good balance in life is having a good amount of very alone time and a certain amount of people time. The latter is largely lacking for me now, but the former is not hard to manage in a city with the right kind of structure. I wonder if many other people have these needs or not..

I tried creating that kind of environment with Google Lively - a nice chair with a desk and couch nearby in the middle of a dark space. Lively is awkward and irritating, although the avatars look good. The word floating around is that it should not be compared to Second Life (the most natural comparison), although if Second Life were slightly easier to embed and had the right defaults for new people logging in, there would be no reason for Google Lively to exist - SL isn't perfect, but apart from those defaults and that SL wants people to pay to create their own slice of land, anything good/useful about lively is better yet in SL. Still... I guess the fact that people use twitter (which still seems strictly inferior to just having another blog with a different signal-to-noise ratio and customs) shows that maybe there's room for something like this, even if only to help establish the barrier between interaction styles with different customs.

(posting delayed because LJ was offline when I wrote this last night)

Recently I heard some of the several nice acoustic tracks added to a "deluxe edition" of the most recent CD from a group I like - they're quite nice, being different enough from the normal versions so as to feel like a cover from another band. I'd love to hear a lot more from that "other band".. and I am also frustrated that *ahem* for those who actually pay for CDs, they'd need to buy yet another copy of the CD to get these tracks. Also, having a band's website be their myspace page is really lame - almost inevitably it looks as terrible as most myspace pages do and also has a copious amount of spam in the comment section.

I've been thinking about how philosophers evolve over time, ( Read more... )

I've also been thinking about the restriction placed, in some flavours of Judaism, on learning about other religions - while I can see how it might make sense from a memetic perspective, that intellectual isolationism bothers me a lot. ( Read more... )

I semi-recently read on a friend's LJ (I think, but I don't remember for sure) a phrase I like about a broad range of seecular philosophies: ( Read more... )

I am quite mystified at looseleaf tea that remains good after 5 infusions.

Also, now would be a great time to fall asleep. Hopefully soon.

Impression:( Read more... )

Memory:( Read more... )

Strange urges to go camping, to rewrite the past and discover lost potentials... alternating moments of hope of turning things around and despair. Still laughing at how for a time I felt trapped in relationships when it became clear they were going sour, and how different that feels to this percieved vast emptiness.

Went jogging for a bit tonight.. Schenley Park and Squirrel Hill are nice at night. People who arn't night owls miss out on so much (although I suppose morning people have their own secrets). I miss long walks in the evening with other people.

I wrote this for someone else who just moved into town - a friend of a friend. It's a list of places worth knowing in Pgh.

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On the other side of that, as you may know I'm keeping an eye on CMU-Pittsburgh, MIT-Boston, and UTexas-Austin for interesting jobs as well as a few places in Ireland and Scotland. If anyone happens to know of any other places that meet most or all of these characteristics where I should consider looking for a job, let me know:

• Weather is warm and rainy - I can budge here
• University atmosphere - ideal, not necessary provided I can socialise enough in university circles. Must have a university, as I am looking for uni employment.
• Bike/walking/PT friendly - I don't want to own a car if I can help it. Public Transit would help...
• Near nature - It would be nice to live near the woods/ocean/mountains/lake/similar, most ideally within walking distance
• Not too big - I can comprimise here
• Liberal - big plus
• Cuturally lively - plus
• Favourable male-female ratio for me - would be a plus
• Someone I know there - would be a considerable plus

I'm guessing tonight will be yet another evening at the 61c....

With some slight perl hackery, I fed my entire blog (more or less) to wordle. Details and larger version available behind the curtain:( Read more... )

It might be cute to mock something like this up using Povray - with sufficient cleverness, much more awesome things could be made.

Another terrifically bad/bizarre/something party game idea:

Invent your own tetris-family game, describe it in enough detail that people could either implement it or imagine playing it. Particularly motivated people should actually implement it... Other particularly motivated people should think about things they might prove about the game in the realm of statistics and math..

Which makes me think there should be a general tetrislike abstraction over SDL for this purpose. What is the best abstraction for tetrislike games?

Family tree:

• clear by lines
• Tetris
• Triangle-tetris - I don't recall the actual name of this, but it used varying shapes composed of tiny triangles instead of squares. It was surprisingly difficult to get used to...
• 3d tetris - a game where one drops blocks from above and has full 3d manipulations to rotate them into place. I remember playing this on DOS but don't quite remember the rules.
• clear by proximate characteristics
• Doctor Mario
• Tetris 2
• Puzzle Bobble - Goes under many names, involves launching of balls and clearing of all touching balls over size 3 of a colour when a new ball hits. Possibly too different to be part of a nice abstraction because of the need for bouncing, the non-grid layout, etc

I also recently came across a presentation mjd gave a long time ago on typing in languages. Poking around, I see he now has a rather awesome blog (which has a LJ syndication). I first met mjd many years ago at one of ORA's Perl (now opensource) conferences - bright and creative guy with eclectic interests. It's unfortunate that Advocacy eventually died out..

Scattered misc stuff:( Read more... )

Hmm.