Will of the People

Today is a good day. I've been airing out my bedroom (Fabreeze generally smells much worse than any scent it is trying to mask, so I opened the outer window to my bedroom, pointed a fan at the carpet, and closed that room off), and sleeping on the floor of my living room makes my back and neck surprisingly happy. There was also a very pleasant-sounding rain throughout much of last night that was soothing. I woke up early, got to work at a sane hour, and had a nice morning playing with some web code for some services I'm running for my research group. My boss was ok with moving our regular meeting times to Friday. He's very cool about schedule matters, which is awesome.

The class itself was fantastic - the professor (Rauh, from Point Park University) has a sense of humour, a flexible approach to teaching, and he illustrates his points very clearly - with the examples he showed on the the overhead, I've already learned a number of terms of art for film, and I've also been forced to be conscious of camera movements and shot technique, something that I don't think I've ever actively perceived before. He gives a break halfway through the class (nicely avoids my tendency to fall asleep after about an hour of hearing someone talk) and has something I've always secretly admired - a near-encyclopedic knowledge of movies (without even a hint of focus on the popular-but-empty films). He knows who HP Lovecraft is, and I get the feeling that apart from possibly the Bollywood films and a few EastAsian films, he's probably seen and had conversations about everything in my movie shelf. I'm impressed. This class will be very awesome - I'm not sure whether I'll learn more about film in general or about Hitchcock, but I expect to learn a great deal.

I expect to finish off this wonderful day with a good dinner (probably at Aladdin's or someplace else I can get some mild wine) and watching either one of the Svankmajer films or Forbidden Zone. Any persons who want to join me for dinner and/or film at my place should let me know soon.

I just pulled/am pulling nearly an all-nighter while I'm still tired from moving. I am still in the cluster, and need to drive home. Hopefully blogging will help wake me up. This is, I think, the first time that I have done this kind of thing for non-work-related purposes for awhile, and it is likewise the first time in awhile that I need to backspace frequently to fix the odd grammar that I'm producing fairly frequently here. The homework was actually enlightening to do -- I learned more of Maple, and it's actually pretty powerful (although its interface is pretty screwy, and the copy installed on the CMU Andrew system is pretty screwy and prone to crash). Things were slightly complicated/delayed with a 3 hour conversation on Judaism, identity, and things tied to them with another KGBer. It was, despite being based on some genuine strong disagreements on definitions and similar, a very pleasant and enlightening conversation.

I'm thinking about the connection between the golden rule and Kant's Categorical Imperative -- are they rephrasings of the same idea or not? The golden rule does not speak explicitly of absolutes or universality, and I find myself wondering if "others", or perhaps the implied context makes it as powerful/equivalent to the imperative. On a larger scale, what is the importance of soundbytes in philosophy? Are the greatest contributions to the world the fundamental ideas, with everything else, like great painters of old delegated to disciples, a mere filling in of details? Take, for example, Rawls -- can we say that the flavour given by the Difference Principle and Original Position (a la Theory of Justice) and the broad outline of what he thinks they lead toward enough to wrap most of what he provides? Is the rest important more than as a demonstration that such things can be drawn from it? In short, would it be enough for him to have stopped there? Was it important that we see the thought exercise carried as far as it has been?

I'll have pictures of my new place as laid out as soon as I unpack enough to figure out where the CF/USB adapter is.

It's time to head home. It's probably a rather bad idea to be driving in this state, but so it goes.

BioInformatics has wandered firmly into the realm of things I understand entirely because it's related to my stuff at work, even using a lot of the same software. I am both relieved and disappointed.

About half the time I take the bus anywhere, there's someone who's a bit unhinged sitting in the front talking to the (unwilling but too polite) driver. Their unhingedness varies from what seems to be mere Asperger's (pretty irritating) to people who are genuinely scary. Sometimes I'm tempted to ask them to be quiet.

My boss won the Heineken award for cognitive science. In that press release, I found that he apparently joined the CMU faculty the same year I was born...

I would write more, but because I had a good amount of cheesecake last night, I have a bad headache today. Given that I am attending a lateish Seder, this is a very bad time to have a headache.. now, I have errands to do relating to selfsame event. I'll write more when I feel better.

I just finished with the third homework assignment for Bioinformatics, and I'm rather proud of this one. I managed to get enough free time to finish it (and the extra credit), and it's done cleanly and prettily. It took me a bit longer to finish than I anticipated because the assignment gave an algorithm for a certain part that was actually incorrect, but once I figured it out and devised a correct algorithm, things came together rather well.

On the laptop front, apparently one of the many tweaks I made to the system broke it in a very strange way: programs that use xresources no longer can parse colour names. Possessing much arcane knowledge, I inspected /usr/share/X11/rgb.txt (which is there and looks pretty normal) and made sure showrgb could see it (which it could). So.. xterm is useless to me right now, as:

tremor:~$ xterm -fg grey -bg black
Warning: Color name "black" is not defined
Warning: Color name "grey" is not defined

and the resulting window is all black. I can still specify colours by providing the hex name, but that's a pain and I really should just figure out what's going on. perl-Tk is also seriously mangled. Apparently some folk have managed to get FC5 happy with the stuff needed for my video card/screen, and in an RPM format no less -- when I get the time, I'll have to check that out. Oh, and Windowmaker segfaults as soon as it starts. I wonder what exactly I did to screw up my system this way. It may possibly be the results of my (stupidly) letting the ATI installer run and then my (more stupidly) attempting to undo its changes by hand. It may be something else. My present way to attempt to cope with this is to run scripts iterating over all packages and verifying them against the system. If this doesn't work, I'll just do a fresh copy onto my external HD and do a fresh install again. Meh.

For the first time ever, I have a laptop that can go to sleep, as Fedora5 has the magic needed to do that automagically. It's interesting (although it, for reasons I don't entirely understand, logs me out).

jwz had a rather amusing summary of the movie Closer:

---

Wow, I hated this movie. More specifically, I despised every character in it. It's a story set over a number of years in which two couples keep cheating on each other with members of the other couple. There's a whole lot of repeated "I need you, I can't live without you" dialog, which, every time, just left me thinking, "ok, why?" Which maybe was the point, but in the end it was just an exercise in watching hollow, untrustworthy people repeatedly betray each other, and really, who gives a shit.

---

I agree with him on it, partway, in that the characters really were all despicable, but they were also rather interesting in a Kundera-esque way. I am rather sensitive to portrayals of infidelity (and I don't think I could ever see John Lennon as being a particularly good person overall because of it), but with a bit of initial adjustment, I can still usually enjoy a film that portrays it. In particular, the film Kinsey comes to mind as having been worth seeing for its exploration of various conceptions of sex as well as the historical saga of Dr Kinsey itself.

I'm really enjoying the mustard I got in Paris a little over a year ago (wow, time really does fly..). It's a pity in some ways that I've gone mostly veggie again -- I don't know what mustard is normally eaten with apart from meat (it's decent with Rye bread..)

oy.. tired.

I did not find the readings assignment for my Bioinformatics class until today. I have 112 pages of book and a paper to read tonight. I guess I can forget about catching up on sleep tonight. Phooey.

I have completely redone my BLOG's Atom feed so it now uses standard modules to generate a more standards-compliant feed. Please let me know if it radically breaks anything for any of you. I believe and hope it will fix some long-standing problems with the way things were done before (my RSS feed is still using hand-rolled code, but I'd like to change that too). As a small added plus, in theory I should have a livejournal feed of my actual BLOG now too. I'll still use my proper livejournal account to solicit opinion on a few things when I feel like it. Enjoy!

(note that, of course, the 1155 entries I've done in my blog over the years are not all imported into LJ, and I *do* hope that I mostly get comments on my actual BLOG on my website rather than on LJ, because LJ does not know who owns the feed and won't email me when comments are left.)

On the off chance you're reading this from the LJ feed, saunter over to my blog on its own site for the full experience.

Next semester, I am signed up to take Computational Biology. This is exciting!

• Lecture notes
• Schedule:
• Tu/Th 14:3-15:5
• F 13:3-14:2

The kind-of course description:This course covers the application of computers to solve problems in biology and medicine. Since computers are increasingly used in biological research, the course is valuable for all biological sciences majors and interested students from other departments. It is intended for students without computer programming experience (students with a desire to apply programming methods to these 03-201 Undergraduate Colloquim for Sophomores problems should take the more advanced course 03-510, Fall: 1-3 units Computational Biology). Topics covered are computational molecular biology (analysis of protein and nucleic acid sequences), biological modeling and simulation (including computer models of neuron behavior, biochemical kinetics, and simulation of mutation), and biological imaging. Course work consists primarily of homework assignments making use of software packages for these applications.....

The kind-of is that I'm taking the mentioned more advanced course, 03-510 which involves programming but lacks a course descripion.

The hands move over the dead body, so still... a gentle touch, flesh againstflesh.. or is it flesh? A gathering of life, touch of food on the body,gentle splash of body.. Not demanding an exception to the rules of life,not expecting, just no thought, and a quiet gift. Can it breathe again?Can the abused body become a living being? Grandson of Herb, I reach outto you again, borrow from Gaia your share.

A few nights ago, I had dinner with a friend who's leaving town,heading to California. It seems that everyone's going to the west coast..I wish her well -- she's been a good friend.

I've been reading a bit about Halal, the Islamic notion of a 'proper/ethicalway of life', including ways of eating, dressing, acting, etc. In connectionwith the changes at work, and my work experience in former workplaces, Ithink it's important to think of a pervasive system of good living that canbe applied to the workplace, an analogue of 'halal management', perhaps. Toprovide some context, Kosher and Halal dietary restrictions are partly abouthumane ways of killing for food. In each, animals are still killed for food.As such, ways of managing businesses might be found that are the leastdehumanizing but still workable.. as a brief aside, I notice here that the term'humane' and 'dehumanizing' both tie the notion of good living with being human,and while I like good living, I think the linguistic tie is bad. We don't livein 1984-land.. Anyhow, while business school presumably teaches people the mostefficient way to run a business, managing people and resources most effectively,I find myself wondering whether they put effort into making the workplace asfulfilling as it might be for people. Like Capitalism in a pure form is adisaster for the environment, efficient management in a pure form is a disasterfor the people who are so managed. What do people cherish in day-to-day worklife, and how can businesses be arranged to best provide that without becomingmonstrously inefficient? We might start this search many ways -- examining whatmakes the people with the money happy, or what discontents the masses.. It'spossible that people really want different things, but there may be some strongcommon threads of things that make people happy/unhappy. Of course, there arealso the people who see work as just something to pay the bills. Ideally thingswould be arranged so that people resemble wild horses more than broken ones.I don't have any answers on this yet ... I know what makes me unhappy, at least,some of said things, and have ideas on how they might be fixed.. but I'd liketo be able to speak more comprehensively before I say more..

The coloured sand blew gently over the hills, a foot pushes forward, throughthe sand.. (but when we think of a foot, do we actually think of a bare foot,or do we think of shoes and some pant leg?) .. Apocalypse is over, and thosewho have seen the end are back again, battered gods with a new world to shape.Some of them clustered in places that were familiar.. York or Leeds, buildingfires, trying to feel the bones of the dead beneath their feet. Others movedfurther out, settling in the countryside.. is this a way to spend eternity?An endless trampling of past gardens?...In this new realm, the game is different, and I saw you.. had a chance toexplain myself.. you looked back at me, sympathy was in your eyes, but youdidn't say anything, didn't tell me how it could be better. I waited for whatI thought you would say, but the conversation drifted to the trivial, and,disappointed, I wandered off alone.

An insight -- tweak my mail client so the timestring thing remembersthe last number it handed out and increments by exactly 1. This will, na klar,mean that the timestring doesn't tightly resemble the recieved time as muchas it does now, but it's still close enough on the scales I'm interested in thatit's not a big deal, and, more importantly, it makes it easier for wildcards tomatch related messages... It also should make mail retrieval faster... I decided to just implement it really quickly, and it indeed does make maila lot faster (previously I was sleeping 2 seconds between each message reciept).I did it with closures instead of with a global variable.. not bad.

Miguel is still wondering why nobody is coming to his Mono party.Arnold is unhappy that his face is on a bobble-head.I've always found it very irritating that the government has decided that actorsand the like 'own' their likeness, and images of them or too close to them, orreally anything that might be connected to them is something they can control.It's even to the point, as noted in the article, that sounding too much likesomeone can be problematic. Sure, roll your eyes, and say that without suchprotections, we wouldn't have people in the field. Better I think that we losesome niceties and have a lot of freedoms in this regard than commit ourselvesto being a wealthy but enslaved people. A bunch of Microsoft/SCO-funded folk,the Torquemada institute, as I'll call them, have been trying to dig up dirton Linus, and got caught. On their site, as I visited it again to BLOG it, Icame across an advert for the following funny project. Speaking of voting,this person is perhaps in trouble. She's done us a publicservice, pointing out that Diebold is among the most dangerous type ofcorporation -- a corrupt company with close government ties and a direct lineto mess up one of the most vital instruments of our nation.

Israel's been having fun, destroying homes,killing protesters, and expanding support of settlements. Nicht genugLebensraum, ich denke.. Es wurd gut, die Israeli-Hawks denken, ob die ganzeHoligestadt hat nur ein reines Volk. Of course, BushJr, being the decisiveleader, has decided to "urge restraint". In other news, as I predicted, aslap on the wrist was given to one of the people guilty of the abusesat Abu Ghraib.He was booted from the military and is to spend a year in jail, which isapparently the maximum penalty. Such a small price to pay for the kind ofdamage he did to those prisoners... Some Muslims call for his death, and whileI'm iffy on the death penalty, I think life imprisonment would definitely beappropriate. Instead, the guy will just bear a year in jail, will go back hometo his drinking buddies, and probably be congratulated for "giving thetowel-heads what they deserve". The real problem, for the administration, isthat they were dumb enough to take pictures and film of their atrocities, notthat the atrocities happened. It's massively inappropriate for the U.S., which,along with Europe, and moreso than Israel, Turkey, Iran, and Syria (mydecreasing rings of how civilized places seem to be), puts forth a lot of effortin being tolerant, liberal, and culturally advanced, to care so little forhuman dignity in its prisoners. Anything like that happening over here wouldcause large scale riots.. Perhaps it's mostly an appearance thing -- regressivenationalism is big in America too..Fortunately, the Europeans are working on ways to keep Americans frompeeking into their communications. On Perlmonks, there's anotherfun idea on how to frustrate the law when it comes to demand your data.I am impressed that Colin Powell has the guts to admit he was wrongin his push for war in Iraq. I would be amused to see the 2nd Iraq war noted inhistory books as the "Oops!" war.

Sorry for this groaner title I'm creating..American Anti-Obesity Programme Fails to Fit Through the DoorWhile we're being silly, imagine people enduring eight years of a sexlessmarrage (blah blah normal spelling sucks blah blah). Sex is an important partof relationships.. well, most relationships. In this case, the couple probablycould've used a cluestick.Some clever Germans have made a mockup of classic MacOS in Flash.For the conspiracy buffs, here are 50 fishy things about the beheading ofNick Berg. I *really* want to see this film -- the Edukators.

If you're using CVS or Subversion, it's probably a good time to upgrade.I've been meaning to try Subversion a bit more -- I'm going to upgrade mylaptop to Fedora2 when I get the time to back it up -- after that I'll probablystart using Subversion regularly. You might want to donate to Mozilla.org..

Russian class is turning out pretty well -- the language has a really neatsound, the professor is really cool, and .. I think I've missed learninglanguage things.