Will of the People

I had a philosophy dream.( Read more... )

Feeling surprisingly not-depressed right now. Hoping it will last for awhile.

Dream:( Read more... )

Just a dream:( Read more... )

I have boxes, but still no place to live in SB nor anyone to take my current place. Hopefully one or both of these will resolve soon. In yet another "nooooooo! Why must this happen when I'm leaving?" moment (surprising numbers of these), the Rocky Horror Picture Show now seems to finally have a regular cast and place here. Damnit. It is seriously not fair for Pgh to keep suggesting all these things when it is theoretically too late to stay but not actually so. Job offers at CMU that actually sound kinda good, new friendships(?), revival of rocky, sudden interest in figuring out and going to grad school, people I might've hung out with more had they lived nearer moving really nearby, Grr. I don't know whether to be more mad at the world for providing the situations or myself for being pulled so neatly towards ugly unsure limbos whenever I try to make changes in my life.

Strangely entertaining (for me) dream:( Read more... )

Dreamed ( Read more... )

Vidocq was a pretty decent film given the genre. When all the pieces come together near the end, earlier parts of the film are called a bit into question, but that's not that unusual. The film is also very pretty - most scenes look like they have hidden in them an excellent poster. The biggest surprise to me is the difficult-to-understand-but-incredibly-strong charm of the character who dies near the start of the film (a strange "main character", as the film's frequent flashbacks paint him life as a substitute for the present). Surprised that mplayer needs to have its support for subtitle files turned on in its configfile, and also that there was a historical investigator Vidocq.

Expect one of those "thoughts on the year" posts sometime today or tomorrow.. I suspect I'll see a lot of other folk doing their own...

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CMU without the students is like a stage between productions.. There's also no place open to eat apart from India Garden. One place I tried to call, Crêpes Parisiennes, has hilarious reviews on citysearch.. I've actually seen some of the rudeness and silly rules (the latter of which I ignore), but as noted it's worth it for the tasty food.

It's interesting to compare the holidays-events various MMO games do - those that are more serious (as in, they have a theme that they tend to stick to) naturally do less, while the more surreal (like Dofus and KOL) tend to hop right into (and make fun of) these themes (Dofus is particularly lovable for its satire - see their entry/description for a weapon called George Bow on their wiki).

Dream:( Read more... )

Last night's dinner was Indian food - I decided to go on the spicy side, and as always when I do that, I was terribly hungry when I woke up this morning. Why is that? I once had a doctor tell me that spicy food increases one's metabolism - could that be the reason?

Two Jonathan Coulton songs you may have missed out on:( Read more... )

I've been slogging through a landscape of old memories recently.. happier times.

Dream:( Read more... )

I've been wrapping up a program for a coworker that presents stimuli relating to famous people. While debugging it, I saw a phrase I never thought I'd see while programming: Argument "Jennifer Aniston" isn't numeric in array element. Somehow this led to combining it with the perl idiom "0 but true" into "0 but Jennifer Aniston", which is even more ridiculous. I'm tired due to negligible sleep last night....

Long dream that has very little to do with anything..

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I had a dream last night where I was explaining to my boss why I quit and became a lecturer on the Cubist movement in art at some Museum/University. Weird dream..

I think it stuck in my mind because a common criticism of philosophy as normally practiced is that it's too far from art (more specifically, poetry) - continental philosophy makes the right kind of arguments and seems to be thinking in more interesting directions, but it usually lacks the humility I think is needed for good philosophy (and analytical philosophy seems to be confused by attitudes towards formalism). I'd like to see philosophy (smaller-sense) move towards an understanding of the aesthetics of ideas - away from analytic formalism and continental certainty. That said, I would hope that postmodernism-as-practiced in art and popular culture wouldn't infect philosophy too deeply - the basic idea that traditions are restraints that can be escaped is something hopefully already well-known to philosophers, and the excesses that have become attached to postmodernism in art and culture are things that should hopefully rejected. The key distinction, I think, is that philosophy needs to construct new values and new conclusions that may be unrelated to existing social norms, and followers of those new philosophies need to feel comfortable applying their values just as strongly as existing philosophies/religions do. Postmodernism, at least in my understanding of it, leads to a weakening of the spirit - it is an illness that is meant to fall to Nietzsche's hammer, acting as a transition or midpoint we can operate from while charting possible futures (and returned to briefly as needed), not a destination. Thinkers should laugh at postmodernist criticisms that to think and believe and live are things of the past (pre-postmodernist) - in successive stages of growth, we all betray our pasts - a cowardly butterfly remaining in its coccoon out of fidelity to its own traditions is an object of pity, not respect.

Now, off to soccer....

Last night, I dreamed( Read more... )

Today looks to be a pretty busy day..

The mist was sparse, like marmite spread too thin on toast. Walking through the thin pockets, our leggings and cheeks collected the moisture as we walked through the wooded hills. Pair by pair, the occasional baby, elder, or lone kinsman walked in the line, people who looked like me, with similar disposition. As was our custom, I began an impromptu song for our wandering, the words materialising in my mind just in time for egress through my lips.

It was a bit of an odd dream, and as I woke up and looked at the clock, the hour and lightness were close enough that it took me a moment to recall that it was evening.

A few days ago, while heading home from work, I checked the used book seller in the Union, and came across a horrid little book called "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam". It was so full of pro-Christian-jingoist lies and distortions that I was inclined to buy it for amusement/horror, but the bookseller wanted $7 for it rather than $1-$2 (not the same bookseller as the guy I usually bought from). Google gives us this - a review on a "Conservative Book Club" site. I am amused how they justify the crusades based on the burning of a church in the middle east while mentioning Theo van Gogh's assassination - I could see people taking either stance (reader can fix-up this sentence's phrasing at their leisure), but considering both to be abominations of Islam takes some mental/value gynmastics. I don't want to pose myself as a great defender of Islam, and in fact have deep concerns about its spread in western society, but the book looked like an artifact of the alternate reality a lot of right-wing people live in that pretends that it and politically correct rubbish are the only things on the planet, disregarding scholarly understanding. Sigh. I'm sometimes bothered that my grandpa, ordinarily a really bright guy (inventor/engineer who made a very good living designing and building things out of his basement for well over 20 years), is so easily taken in by this crap. He's not a christian (spiritualist who's vaguely close to christianity), but he passes around stuff like this all the time.

This should be a pretty decent weekend - breakfast with Dmitriy tomorrow, after which we're going to Half-Price Books in the south hills. After that, I should be spending a bit of time at work reconfiguring a busted RAID, and then if I'm up for it an evening RHPS-related gathering. Sunday, depending on if enough people actually express interest, I might be hosting a MST3k/DrWho/RedDwarf/Gaming event at my place. Alternatively, I can sit around wonder what events (or reasons) conflict with a good time event at my place that mixes wine, cats, and amusements. Either way, fun!

Melotron's song "Gesindel" is darkwave music with a choral singing part in the middle. It's fantastic. Thinking about interesting combinations, I was thinking that some of the more beat-oriented darkwave might make an interesting mashup with Hip-hop - VNV Nation and Eminem might be particularly interesting to do, a la "Dean Grey".

Before I went to sleep last night, I happened to remember a face that I haven't seen for many years, and I couldn't place it for quite some time. Eventually, I stumbled across them on one of the friend-mapping websites, and remembered she was a close friend to someone I really disliked in the OSU CS social circles. ( Read more... )

At work, I was given a new topic and a rough sketch of an experiment! This is exciting - it does mean I have a lot of work ahead of me finishing the design, implementing/programming it, and laying out the analysis path, but I'm glad to have some more variety in things I'm doing at work. This also is up there with the Towers of Hanoi experiment I started with in the most interesting experiments I've run - the appeal of this one is more of a psychology-type thrill though - the memory manipulation, while relatively simple, promises very interesting results.

This may make me a bad person in some people's eyes, but here are my impressions on various parts of the United States, with their suitability as places to live. I'm not presently planning to move elsewhere in the United States, but...

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This might amuse suitably geeky people.

For people who follow Wikipedia/WMF politics,( Read more... )

I absolutely *love* being able to air out my apartment. I also absolutely love being able to buy the blue stuff everywhere. Last night, I determined that it is not, in fact, worse than the 2005 vintage (it's actually better, roughly on par with the 2004), it was just that I made the elementary mistake of drinking it warm rather than cold when I judged it. Oops. Anyhow, spring cleaning continues, and that's nice too.

Last night, because I've been watching some Dr Who episodes on tape recently, I had appropriately themed dreams. The theming was light though -- what interested me is that the possibilities for motion were larger than life, as with most of my dreams. In this, if I were sitting down with my legs straight ahead, getting into the right frame of mind would let me scoot forward over what I was sitting on without moving and with no friction. In other dreams, I can curl up into a ball in the air and fly, or sometimes swim through the air. Very occasionally I have dreams where I can teleport or create wormholes. It's very rare that I have dreams where I am bound by normal rules of motion - without getting into some Jungian analysis (or maybe with, I don't really mind), I wonder why this is such a consistent theme in my dreams.

While eating breakfast at Rolladin with a friend, I picked up a Lubavitch newsletter that looked interesting. Like with all random literature that catches my eye for a moment, I've been reading bits of it on the bus and while walking. One of the sections talks about the purpose of the Revelation on Mt Sinai - that prayer and torah study bring people to a certain level of spirituality that is then used as a base for achieving higher levels through making one's life holy through following mitzvot. The thing I don't understand is that at one point of that section, it implies that the ancient Hebrews were studying Torah before that revelation -- I don't know if I'm just misreading that, or if it's meant to suggest a pre-Pentateuch Torah of some kind. Very brief diggings into the topic suggest that there are a few flavours of Judaism that don't believe that quite the entire Torah to be of Mosaic origin, but most flavours do.

It looks like today shall not be quite as awesome as I had hoped. Oh well.

For the first time in a long time, I had a horror dream that's scary in a general way, in this case it was quite lovecraftian. What I can remember:( Read more... )

It was a pretty creepy dream. It's hard to convey though. Apparently while asleep, I must've twisted a lock of my hair together - sometimes I do this while nervous or bored.

Yesterday, I presented some of the data from the experiment I'm wrapping up. I'm not sure if I did that well - there are a number of additional things I'll need to do (and ideally automate) for future presentations. One of the things I actually like about this field is that, in presenting results, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to presenting things better. When I started, I don't think anyone else in my group tossed all their files up on a webpage (instead emailing them to the appropriate people). People are still labelling brain regions in pencil on paper or manually with photoshop (I can probably write a tool to do this automatically), and people didn't really script things much. There's so much low-hanging fruit it's almost daunting - where to start?

My body recently has been telling me to drink lots of white tea. Yum.

I'll end this entry with an amusement - this comic, courtesy Ozy and Millie, an occasionally philosophical webcomic I like, is a pretty decent description of the philosophy of some people I know, people who don't approve of or believe in anything real. Some of them construct an ahistorical glorious past which they can glorify without needing to provide any details, and others simply disapprove of everything. It's interestig to watch.

Just woke up from a kind of strange dream, and will return to dreaming as soon as I jot this down. I was filling out the paperwork for yet another frequent buyer's club thing in a supermarket, and the person who was prompting me as to what to fill in said I was joining "TEAM GOAL", which is somewhat less than inspired. He said that as a result of joining, I would receive 30-40 swimsuits (WTF?!) and led me to a dock out behind the store where 2-3 other people joining the programme were being taught the basics of how to swim. Although normally when I'm asleep, I find it hard to find *ANYTHING* weird, this did seem pretty amusing even then.

Update: Good morning! After I got back to sleep, I was wandering around with some campers, and ended up in the midst of some convention or large camp with multiple groups using it. I started to sing some songs from Shock Treatment to myself, and some nearby people joined in - eventually a good number of people joined in, although some other guy decided to get all dressed up and kind of stole the show, shifting it to other types of music that eventually became pop. Sigh. Still, it was fun while it lasted. He seemed to have a better voice anyhow.

Last night's dinner was a rare pleasure. Hurrah.

Here's to finding cool stuff in dreams, and failing to take it out of said dreams into reality. Ahh well, at least my credit card is not charged. I can imagine the "location" field looking kind of funny for those purchases anyway...

• 2 Jan 2007 17:40 - Pittsburgh, PA - $8 - INDIA GARDEN
• 2 Jan 2007 23:08 - Pittsburgh, PA - $12 - GIANT EAGLE
• 3 Jan 2007 06:45 - Dreams - $23 - THAT DREAM YOU HAD WHERE YOU JUMPED HIGH TO WIN A POSTER AND THEN BOUGHT WHAT YOU JUMPED HIGH TO GRAB
• 3 Jan 2007 11:05 - Pittsburgh, PA - $60 - NATIONAL CITY CASH WITHDRAWL

If I am to buy stuff in dreams, it should be decisions, judgements, and ideas. While those often turn out to be incoherent or broken in the realm of waking thought, at the very least they have a *chance* of being useful.

To get in real life (unrelated to dream acquisitions): more blankets, plastic to cover windows, possibly electric heater (I've bought many of these over the years, and have discarded them every time I ran out of space while moving. Unwise).

• Plus: I woke up this morning to find that my hair is totally awesome. It looks like a mix between "mad scientist" and "nobility", just the way I like it.
• Minus: Recent stress makes me look at least five years older. Sigh.

Interesting dreams. Last night, I again had one of those "alternate world" (very specific meaning for my dreams) dreams, this time set at CMU. The dorms were all set in alcoves inside the art building, and were (moderately) larger on the inside than the outside. They bore a certain resemblance to Japanese tube hotels externally (with similar entrances), and were about as large as a trailer home on the inside. I was still staff, but lived inside one too. It was actually pretty awesome.

Right before I woke up, I had an awesome "idea dream", which I'm kicking myself for not having a few months ago - I should've taught a StuCo. I'm not sure if, as a non-degree student, I would actually be eligible to teach one (although I seem to remember Sean Knight managing to do it), but there are plenty of things that might be fun to teach that way. The dream had me teaching the programming environment DOS users dealt with, initially picking up my dad's old hobbyist Simplex method programming (which he did in QuickBASIC) and then moving on to QuickC and DJGCC (32-bit dos extender). I then thought it might be awesome to dust off the design/code for my old Roguelike and make it into a group programming project that would teach very clean OO-Perl (teaching the basics of OO-Perl and Curses as needed). Now that I'm fully awake, I realise that there are tons of rather spiffy things that I would've loved to teach/be involved in in a group. As I said though, oops -- it's too late for the coming semester, and after that I'm likely to be out of here (even if not, this coming year will wash away a number of the interesting people I would've hoped to be in the class). Le Sigh.

I just woke up from a nice dream where the people in my research group were asking all sorts of questions on using Unix more effectively. I was delighted that near the end they were beginning to ask programming questions, and the last one, "how can I change my programs to allocate memory more efficiently?" was about to lead me to explain slab allocation and some wonderful technical details that make me feel all fuzzy inside, but I woke up before I actually got to start talking. In the between-awakedness states, I remember being very frustrated.

As much as I've been trying to round out my character in the years since university, I still am an OS geek. There are times I think I should've gone to work for one of the big iron Unix vendors... If I ever end up working for google, perhaps I'll be a professional OS geek again.

I must admit though that my current position, of being the only CS geek among a bunch of research-oriented people who are using Unix, is quite nice. In real life, I don't think I'll ever get the last question (programming is a very useful "extra" skill in psychology, and some of my coworkers can "kind of" do it, but not in the deeper sense)...

At Ohio State, CIS 221/222/321 were the intro CS courses - they "weeded out" about two thirds of the people who initially tried to get into CS. Some people were unable to grasp essential concepts and dropped out within the first month. Other people didn't have the right kind of mind for programming - they could program a little bit, but it took them a very long time and making original code (as opposed to finding an example and altering it) was almost impossible. They typically left near the end of the first class or the middle of the second class - in theory they could program, but the efforts involved were probably about ten times the people who stayed. Everyone else found it easy. The second group probably benefitted from their experience - I would wager that most of them do token programming and scripting through their careers - even a little bit of that is incredibly useful in many careers, whether it be tweaking some AppleScript or VBScript to automate some computer stuff or getting a better feel for how programmers think (and thus how programs are written). I have a suspicion that the process of becoming attuned to a programming language and thinking within its constructs is a big part of what doesn't happen for the second group - whenever I learn a new programming language and don't use pseudocode, I go (quickly) through that kind of helplessness in trying to be effective, and a lot of my difficulties resemble theirs.

I sometimes am amused at exactly how much of the standard C libraries we absorb in learning this craft (and for those of us who take those paths, the Java and Perl APIs, among others). If someone were unable to absorb much of any of those, could we call them a programmer? What could they do?

I just spent a considerable time wandering around a house I was renting, in my dream, trying to figure out ways to get any appreciable light on the outside - there was some kind of pervasive thickness in the darkness outside that was resisting any light source. I didn't seem to notice that the dream place was a smaller version of the Tanager Trail house in Brecksville, nor find it especially odd that the giant grey cat my mom (by the name of Oliver - he's the noisiest cat I've ever known, always grumbling to himself) has was another of my cats (and an outdoor cat at that). Some part of me was excited, as I woke up, that this is a new dream motif, but then I remembered that I had this dream once before. My dreams are often reruns with moderate variations. I wonder if other people get that..

Tonight's sunset was amazing. I tried several times to capture it on my digital camera, with only very limited success.

I continue to be irritated by thinking of the animated film Anastasia - it's a strange revisionism that, from my perspective, removes the good guys neatly from history. I find it easy to identify with the early Soviet Revolutionaries - I would've liked to have participated in those times, trying for a better result. Reading Mao gives me great respect for the man, and his times/place were interesting, but early Soviet History (and the Kerensky years) seem like they would feel like home.

Outdoor cats... I've never really been happy with the idea of keeping cats outdoor - my cats are crazy enough indoors, and I don't like the idea of them catching illnesses (or having bad interactions with a car), fighting with other cats, or possibly not coming back. Certain cats in my family have always had the distinction of being outdoor cats, but I've never felt comfortable doing that with any of mine. Pittsburgh isn't Brecksville though..

I want to snowboard this winter. I hope I'll find some people to go do that with me - doing that alone is .. hmm.. Anyhow, I'd primarily like to go to Seven Springs (unless someone knows of a better place to go, where better = offers board-friendly slopes that are at least as long, possibly for a better price or closer). I should note that, for the more competitive folk, I am not particularly good at snowboarding, and have no desire to get better - I have a good time. This goes for many things in life, and has sometimes irritated people.

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I appear to have not entirely suceeded in convincing people not to get me a gift for the coming holiday season. For the unaware who would otherwise be inclined, I don't particularly want holiday gifts..
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To close, on the topic of continents, Wikipedia's article on Continents gives several different models for how many continents there are. For as long as I've had a perspective on the matter, I've preferred six continents: North/Central America, South America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica (I am somewhat tempted to consider Greenland another continent). My notion of continent is decently described as a large enough chunk of land with a small or nonexistent land tie to another large enough chunk.