Will of the People

I now have a phone number on Google Voice. ( Read more... )

Oh, and the below is very silly, a bit risque, and NSFW. ( Read more... )

Developed On Rule of Law and Legalism (essay) to the point where it might say some interesting things. I sometimes think it would be nice to just carry around a tape recorder and publish it at the end of every day, but the refactoring it for public consumption probably does me good for a few reasons - it helps me more aware of which concepts and frameworks I've already presented (and can thus rely on), it helps me consistently use standard English, it makes me explicitly recognise how important or sure something is and where it should be categorised, and it's something that's actually searchable. All the little scraps of paper I jot to myself are generally in not so externally understandable a state. On the other hand, there's hardly anything up while there is a lot more written or sketched.

I recently finished Neil MacFarquhar's 「The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday」. It was an excellent book that deserves a strong recommendation for anyone interested in Middle Eastern politics (and the relationship between people and government in general). Haaretz review, Google authors series with the author.

I again wish that Youtube did not give authors the ability ot disable ratings or comments on videos. The ability to annotate and rate is important in society, and providing easy tools to do that, if not done in the browser (where it really should be done) it makes sense not to make it difficult for people to do it on site if they offer it on other media.

This is the first example of the HTML canvas element that I have seen. It's not a perfect example (the text popups for some elements are invisible when they show up over another icon) but it's pretty neat (and less of a gross hack as Lemmings in DHTML).

Dear Google,

You get a big thumbs down for making it impossible to report a bug on google spreadsheets. No, I don't want to post to a forum. Set up Bugzilla, and stop wasting 15 minutes of my (and presumably others) time bouncing all over your site looking for a way to submit a bug report.

P.S. Your array evaluation mode is busted. If it's not powerful enough to do something, failing is better than doing something arbitrary. I admittedly am not a spreadsheet guru (although I have reluctantly learned a few tricks from some).

I don't use Excel outside of very rare circumstances( Read more... )

The novel 「Let the Right One In」 is rather good. It's a lot more chatty than the film, and the plot feels fuller. The film is still a masterpiece and the better of the pair, but I can recommend the book as well. Apparently young vampire romances are all the rage right now, with 「Twilight」 being the next series to succeed 「Harry Potter」 in popular novels. In contrast to a number of people trashing Twilight online, I'm just happy to see people reading instead of watching TV.

Sarah Palin resigned as governor. With her being unpredictable and tempermental, nobody's sure why she did it or what she has planned in the future. So long as she stays out of politics, I wish her well in future endeavours. She has the wrong temperament and is not qualified for high political office, but she's not particularly reprehensible. There are a lot of people like her - I think many people I've known who have not put a lot of effort in self-improvement would act as she has in most regards - she's recieved a lot of attention in the media that would look just as harsh shining on most people. Only a few people are suitable for high public office, and only a few can manage to look good enough to be elected to it. We just have to hope that we get more of the intersection of those bubbles rather than just the latter (maybe if we can raise the level of public discourse high enough the latter will be less of a concern because people will learn to recognise the former, presuming we stay in our current rough form of government).

Last night's "adventures":( Read more... )

Incidentally, as it's come up recently, I know I've been mopy and probably often not very pleasant to read - if you don't want to read my LJ, feel free to remove me from your friends list without any worry that my feelings will be hurt. For most of you we're just acquaintences in real life anyhow (even though in many circumstances I wanted more). Know as well that if I do so I don't necessarily mean to be saying anything beyond that I am not regularly interested in reading your posts. There have been times where I have unfriended someone as part of cutting them out of my life entirely, but I will trust people to use overall judgement to figure out when I am doing that if it is not obvious.

The Valve/STEAM games are pretty neat, but they're quite buggy and I had to hack on some config files. I understand this has to do with their trying to be AMD64-aware.

The relation of Wikipedia's don't be a dick to judgement in law is something I'm chewing on again, particularly in the context of thorny torts like tortious interference. I think it's a problem when people seek to skirt the edges of laws (in areas not meant to be hard edges) to protect problem behaviour (we need some mechanism as a society to complement law with shunning/shunning/penalty for acts harmful to the more abstract interests of society, ideally one with fewer (but not no) teeth but also without the constraints of ex post facto), but there are several instances where it is unclear what the resolution should be. For instance, we can imagine environmentalists who learn of contracts against the interest of the biosphere to do their best to make it impossible for such contracts to be met. Tortious interference? Should business interests in the general case take interest over ecological interests except in narrowly defined circumstances? Contracts become ways to bind third parties when such an intent entirely within an organisation would presumably lack such protections. Yet it's not difficult to imagine circumstances where it is a useful tort to recognise.

The building next to Crazy Goat (near Whole Foods) is bizarre, interesting, and not unattractive.

From a very late walk home that would've taken 45 minutes if I had been 「on task」 but instead turned into a 2-3 hour adventure:

( Read more... )

Beyond the relatively uninteresting-but-important thing of being a search engine (I know there are some interesting parts but overall it is not flashy), I think Google's success at being more than a search engine comes down to three things:

• Designing and adopting software institutions for effective, low-management, high-efficiency distributed code. This is sophisticated and interesting, but it's not obvious why someone would want it until one sees what Google has done with it. The failure of other software-as-service vendors to do this as generally hampers their flexibility and leads to high development, deployment, and maintenance costs for any service they decide to one-off. Google has published at least some of the code to manage this - even considering that they don't publish everything, the risk is low that they're helping their competitors too much because alongside the software infrastructure they've built hardware to its spec for long enough that they have a good lead.
• Designing and adopting software institutions for a powerful user interface in the browser. This is also sophisticated and interesting, and also not obvious until one sees why someone would want it. Apart from the search engine itself and very high end applications (e.g. Google Earth), all high profile google applications rely on this and would be very difficult to imagine done without that toolkit.
• Keeping a simple design æsthetic. Other search engines and internet services have come and gone, many of which made their sites prettier than google's. We should understand that as vanity - google's software is low-frill enough that it feels like a utility, with the very occasional quirks kept to a minimum and nondisruptive (e.g. custom google logos per certain days of year). Except when the user's network is bad, the Google experience is as fast and reliable as flicking a lightswitch

Any of Google's competitors could probably have done these things and been roughly as successful - the other specifics of Google are not necessarily significantly helpful (or helpful at all) towards their goals. I don't believe Google can live up to its 「don't be evil」 motto when their primary source of revenue is advertisements (adverts being intrinsically harmful). The tendency not to charge end-users for products helps them get mindshare, but if software is good enough at some useful tasks, it can still be expensive and thrive (e.g. Lotus Notes).

I recently reluctantly moved some spreadsheets for our lab on campus from GNUMeric on my laptop (which I utterly love) to Google Spreadsheets. The collaboration stuff is well done enough to make me forgive the interface.

The concept of Mujtahid, from Islam, is a useful one to help us understand the role that value-philosophers (particularly but not exclusively trailblazers) should take on themselves to play in society. Similar scholarly and behavioural/character traits should be present, mixed as well with aspects of being a prophet/lawgiver. Appropriately secularised and with a greater emphasis on creativity and the risks of opposing existing social order (whether entering into the field of law (practically or theoretically) or focusing on matters of compatible value or not), it is appropriate to say that this type of philosopher should hold themself to that level of standard.

I am not certain if the Shi'a term of Marjah applies as well by analogy, but it is also informative.

Attn broadcast news media,( Read more... )

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Al Jazeera's article about institutional Christianity in the US military worries me. Also, I kinda like Bruce Schneier, but he recently had a post advocating an end to password masking that strikes me as being so horrifically wrong that it's left me pretty much speechless.

Portal was a lot of fun, but it was very good at making me queasy and upsetting my stomach. I imagine it would only be worse to be the main character - in the challenge mode at the end of the game, there should be a challenge to make it through the level without being sick all over oneself. I can't say I liked the timing-critical parts, but the puzzle aspect was quite good. I've played portal before now, but never more than a bit of playing around (and never enough to feel ill).

When I was younger I sometimes got this from visiting Omnitheatres.

Portal felt too easy, but I am not sure how one could make it harder without making it impossible - there were times when I had to think (mostly in the bonus levels), but not *that* deeply.

The downside to Portal sickness is that, like tetris, the puzzles pop back in my mind and even the memory of them is enough to make me feel sick again.

It is potentially just as interesting to imagine what we would design buildings like if we had portals and springshoes as if we had usable wings (which I often daydream about).

Wherein I try to constrain my mopiness and tell tales of animals:( Read more... )

Oh, also, I have a very large collection of random documents that have caught my eye over the years, and occasionally I pick a random one and read it. I recently chose this one, and thought it was particularly cute (and a bit challenging) - it's about applied statistics in Monty Hall-type games. My intuitions on it were initially wrong (my approach to statistics is mostly based on intuition and while not very formal is generally pretty good), and so it took me awhile to translate the paper's logic into my perspective. It was a good exercise and feels like a full mental meal - I feel that it helps remind me about the right way of statistics so hopefully I got useful broader regularities out of it.

FC11 has some awesome stuff in its repositories that is not (but should be) installed by default.

"yum install padevchooser paprefs"

This gives you a widget called "Pulseaudio Device Chooser" which you can use to either publish your sound card on the local network or send your audio to other published devices on the local network. It's pretty easy to pipe all your audio to another machine - I don't yet see a GUI way to mirror your audio between local and remote. Bandwidth use seems to be pretty reasonable.

It's been possible to do this manually for quite a long time (with various sound servers), but maintaining different sets of configfiles based on where one physically is (for laptop users) is a shoddy solution. It takes some getting used to that your local volume control is not honoured - I am not sure whether it should be or not.

(this probably applies to those of you on other Linux distros too)

A quick cheat sheet to the Iranian Soap Opera (I have seen news organisations get much of this terribly wrong in the last few days):( Read more... )

This has turned into a particularly difficult and lonely weekend. ( Read more... )

However, I did manage to make some Paneer Tikka Makhni that was pretty good. Paneer is in fact very easy to cook with, and there are some wonderful canned sauces (like tomato sauce in preparedness) at Whole Foods. I am not sure what it would take to actually make those sauces from their sources, but it might be good to learn - the sauces are not quite right (India Garden's version at spiciness level 8/10 is reasonably close to the way they should be but also not quite there). Whole Foods has a number of other canned indian sauces that look promising for other meals. I need to get some wild rice, as I like its taste better than white rice in almost all dishes. Apart from puffed rice, I really like most types of rice. I hope it's healthy for a vegetarian diet.

I really don't like father's day very much, a bit beyond not liking most holidays. ( Read more... )

Rereading Murakami's 「Wind-Up Bird Chronicle」, recently re-watched 「Pollock」 and 「Naked Lunch」. All three are among the best cultural products of recent times, I think.

It's also a little bit weird to be getting pseudopersonal email from Michelle Obama. Everything this administration does makes me wonder what's going to become precedent.

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(Mohammad Khatami on the left, Mohammad Ali Abtahi on the right)

Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a former reformist government minister under Mohammad Khatami, was recently arrested in Iran, according to a guest-blogger on his blog.

I have long enjoyed the candid commentary by Abtahi over the years I have read his blog, and wish him, Khatami, and Mosavi well in the ongoing political mess over there. I feel like I have a personal stake in this now as I've exchanged a mail or two with Abtahi and respect him. (In politics, you don't always get to design the people or the circumstances you like from scratch, but some people, regardless of how they would move things relative to where you are, are good people).

You may do a google news search and find your own story on him.

(I am still without power)

If I wanted to live somewhere where the power is unreliable, I'd move to Azerbaijan. Damnit. Second day of coming home to darkness.

Here's to hoping the cats remain afraid of the candles and that the batteries to my various laptops last me awhile.

I suspect that everything in the fridge is going to rot, sadly including the Paneer I was hoping to experiment with. Still, maybe the timing is not so terrible as being on a mood downswing makes me want to sleep all the time anyhow.

I also made the mistake of buying candles that smell like food, which make me hungry. These candles *really* smell like delicious pies. I suspect there is someone whose entire job is to make candles smell like food. Mmm. Sigh.

Finished: 「Heirs of Mohammad」. Thoughts on piety, values, what it means to be a good person:( Read more... )

PZ Meyers, while a good professor (I have learned quite a bit of assorted biology from reading his blog), is a troll on the topic of atheism. It is not that I think a hardline position on atheism is unwarranted, but a kneejerk one is. There exist people who believe there to be no god( Read more... )

• You know it's storming hard when you must tilt your umbrella at 45° to maximally block rain.
• You know it's raining hard when the curb and street both have the same water level
• You know it's raining hard when you live in a community on the top of the hill and the supermarket floods
• You know you have a nice laptop wireless antenna when there's no power in several blocks in all directions but you can still pick up some random person's wireless

Fortunately, I have candles. Unfortunately, Wean Hall is apparently flooded again. Tomorrow won't be fun (my machine room is there). Fortunately, I have some very good peanut butter and my laptop's power is holding out.

Yesterday, I placed an order for something I've wanted for awhile and two things came in that contribute greatly to my physical comfort:( Read more... )

「The Heirs of Mohammad」 is turning out to be a really good book. I'd hesitate to call Mohammad a good guy given that I don't approve of some of his morals (keeping multiple wives, reasons for conquest, power politics), but as portrayed he seemed very human, not horribly puritan, and a generally good and intelligent leader. ( Read more... )

Strange idea: connect computer-aging-of-faces algorithms and what-would-it-look-like-if-they-had-a-child algorithms...

Pittsburgh is a good city for trying to imagine what the landscape would be like untouched by our species.

Anyone who could manage to talk like this would be my hero for the week.

I never expected the Iranian elections to be as fascinating as this, with all sorts of power players entering the field. It reminds me of Gore v. BushJr in that ( Read more... )

I believe Pensacola Christian College represents much of what I don't like about the United States. I am glad they are not accredited, but very disappointed that they exist. I did find an article which expresses why I, as a moderate (or at least cautious) socialist, still have some respect for John McCain (and to an extent his daughter Meghan McCain) - despite the broad gap over issues, I believe McCain, over his career, has been more of an honest and respectable statesman than most politicians (making him stand even further out in the current atmosphere of the Republican Party). The recent campaign did not show him at his best (and I think we got the president out of the deal), and I think we got the better president out of the deal, but I still like him.

Someone pointed me recently at this. It would be amusing and introduce much drama to use (or have used) this form liberally.

The Gates Centre preparations continue - in a little over a month I'm responsible for a machine room migration and to a much lesser degree a lab migration. The upper floors are( Read more... )

Mental state continues to be rather lousy - sleeping a lot more helps a bit.

Musings on love in the abstract:( Read more... )

I finished whipping another philosophical essay into being kind of presentable:Epistemology.

I'm not sure why I find it so emotionally involving to see people either really interested in something or really sad. ( Read more... )

The choice of heroes in any philosophy and weighing of what they do by outsiders builds barriers in ways that are probably harder to heal than issues of doctrine. ( Read more... )

Last night I was having a reasonably good hair day, and while heading back from Crazy Goat, the recent hockey game had just ended in Pittsburgh's team's favour so a lot of people were driving around celebrating with their horns and beer. Some party-jumped-up gals from their car called me a hottie and asked where I was going .. I felt like an alien - all I could really think is that they really wouldn't like me at all if they got to know me, and so their complements felt a bit like one of those famous bridge disasters. Meh. I don't really like compliments even at the best of times.

I often wish there were a part of the country that would be perfect( Read more... )

Té Café's nicer teas are really fine. I also picked up some Paneer from Whole Foods that I am looking forward to using in cooking experiments.

I shall probably have a nice long evening walk once I get home from here.