Salt Trick

ROI

2011-04-15T07:44:00.004-05:00

I was thinking that I ought to clean up my inbox finally. A good way to get a lot of crap out of my inbox fast would be to just plow through the unread messages. So I'd have to filter the inbox for just the unreads. It's not really hard. I used to do it. You go into the view menu, and there's a submenu, and you get a dialog box, and you open another dialog box from there, and there's a tab where you can set a filter. Then you have to remember to do it again later to turn off the filter. I can remember how to do it if I try.

If I try.

Why would I try?

Why invest in turning on a filter? Why haul out the mental equipment to do this task?

There's a shortcut if I were gonna do it several times. You can save the set of View settings as a named view, and then you can switch to that view from a convenient pull-down menu any time. I used to do that sort of thing. I had views like MonkeyView01 which was good for reviewing new mail, and another that was good for something else. I did that kind of shit. Making a view takes extra clicks. It's worth it if you're gonna use the view a few times. I could quantify the cutoff; decide a good metric is number of clicks and then count, and if you're going to use that view more than three times it's worth it. There were views I invested in that passed the cutoff, and others that didn't. Good investments, bad investments. Of course, just learning that I could make views, and then how to make views is a chunk of investment I haven't counted.

And now I don't do that shit any more. What's the payoff of cleaning out my inbox? Really? Where would a risk/reward calculation land me, if I were to invest in it? Would I get fired before any investment in a tidy inbox paid off? Or would a tidy inbox keep me from being fired, somehow?

There was a Wired article, after the big financial meltdown, about the mathematical risk model that the big financial institutions used when deciding what securities were a good investment. Turns out it was wrong.

So if they pay Ph.D.s to calculate what's worth investing in, and they can't help but fuck up, what hope have I got?

Fuck my inbox.

re: Flash

2010-04-30T16:51:00.001-05:00

Oh, come on, people. Flash was always a hack. Real web engineers always hated it. The Web was missing features, and Adobe filled that gap, but did so by subverting the transparency that was the whole point of the Web. How many web developers have thrown up in their mouths a little bit on coming across a website for a small business, designed and sold by a 'designer' with good intentions, which dances and sings but renders the poor oblivious business utterly invisible to search engines?

While Flash was relevant, the interstitial landscape it created was host to a horde of artists who committed themselves to learning its rules but who were ignorant of the shape of its looming boundaries. Now that the needed standards have been provided by the responsible standards bodies, the designers cry out in shock as the gap which became their home closes around them.

Tomorrow, Metaphorically (Maybe)

2010-03-02T12:20:00.002-05:00

What am I doing? Recently I half-joked that I was "watching for signs of the Apocalypse." Subtract the kooky religious implications and that's kind of true. I don't mean the Christian Apocalypse literally, nor do I really believe in the more extreme descriptions of the geek Singularity, but I do have a strong feeling that interesting changes are either imminent or happening already. They'll have broad effects, they'll catch us by surprise, and we may not even know they've happened until we look back at them. While "expect the unexpected" usually receives a response of sarcasm these days, I'm going to say it anyway; I mean by it that we need to stretch our creative faculties if we want to have any hope of understanding, let alone predicting, the nature of the changes that are coming.

The people who have done this well in the past have been the writers of speculative fiction; that's probably why I identify myself as wishing to become a writer of speculative fiction. But it's not the "writer" part or the "fiction" part that I really have in my soul, it's the "speculative" part. I can't help it. I'm like a kid on the night before Christmas; I can't sleep, I'm so excited thinking about what I'll get tomorrow.

2010-01-26T10:00:00.001-05:00

He's afraid; he doesn't know what of. He's watching for signs of the Apocalypse. Not like they say in their books, no, he's cleverer than they.

But when the god in his head sends commandments, he obeys just as they would.

2010-01-25T11:18:00.002-05:00

I'm reading Verlinde's paper, and I don't have the background to really follow it. I don't know the referents. But I can kind of grasp the logical structure.

There's something important in it; there's a memetic connection that hasn't been made before. Something right. But it also feels like there's an error in it somewhere. I've seen it said that it treats space as emergent from information theory, but I don't think it does. But I think it could have.

Noetic Flux

2010-01-12T16:11:00.000-05:00

Is entropy anisotropic along the edges of a Feynman diagram?

2010-01-02T12:41:00.001-05:00

The problem has seemed to be to derive ought from is, to find a goal for the tool.

Science in the subjunctive mood

2009-12-16T10:24:00.000-05:00

"One difficulty in discussing the propagation of classicality through the Complete Feynman Diagram is that the term 'propagation' suggests that we are discussing a temporal phenomenon, which we are not."

Connoisseurship is not important

2009-12-15T10:25:00.000-05:00

No, see, connoisseurship is a hobby. It's not important. Well, except maybe insofar as it's good to hone your senses. But otherwise, no. Please do not think that I think that it's important.

incomplete

2009-12-10T10:27:00.000-05:00

so what does Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem actually give us as a take-home message? what's the upshot? we treat it with great reverence, but what does it actually mean? it's usually accompanied by some parenthetical words about its meaning, when it appears in works for the layman, but they're often quasi-mystical and never fully worked out, much less verified or even verifiable.

Do you tweet?

2009-12-07T17:48:00.002-05:00

I just now worried that I hadn't checked my email for a while and that there might be people expecting me to, and then I thought, well, hey, I used to compulsively glance at my system tray for the Outlook new-mail icon every half a minute; is it so bad that I've re-architected not to do that any more?

See, stuff like that doesn't fit in a tweet, so I gotta keep this blog.

I know you know I know.

2009-11-17T16:33:00.000-05:00

so if everyone had Logical Fallacies as part of their education, it wouldn't matter if everyone remembered the specifics. it would matter that everyone knew that there were fallacies, and that everyone knew that everyone else knew.

Polling

2009-09-24T15:19:00.002-05:00

When a computing process wants to keep informed about new information, one technique engineers use is a polling mechanism. Polling is when you go check in a known location to see if there's anything new waiting for you there. Engineers debate about setting polling intervals and when not to use a polling mechanism, and so on, because polling consumes resources. You have to be careful when designing a system to make sure it doesn't demand that a computer do too much polling.

But nobody seems to mind when you design a system that demands that the user do lots of polling. Your mailbox at home, your work inbox, your email inbox, your other email inbox, your other other email inbox, your Twitter page, your LiveJournal inbox, your facebook inbox, your voicemail, your cell voicemail, your RSS reader... all of these demand that you go check them periodically. Which is really not an efficient use of your processor. And every time somebody adds a cool new communication service to the world, they add one more place that everybody has to poll.

Temptation

2009-09-01T07:45:00.001-05:00

An angel offering eternal salvation to a mortal man is like a hot teacher offering sex to a teenage boy. No matter how sure he is that he wants it, he really doesn't know enough to fully comprehend the scope of the offer.

Net

2009-06-23T15:17:00.002-05:00

Jesus, Christ, all these thoughts. A torrent.

Writing my thoughts is like dipping a goldfish net into a river. Too small goes through. Liquid goes through. Too big breaks the net. Too clever or quick wriggles out. Too far from the bank is entirely out of our purview. And what about before I arrived, and after I leave?

So if something solid and dumb that is bigger than the holes in the net and smaller than the whole net happens to pass close to the bank at precisely the moment I dip the net, I might catch it.

And why am I sitting on this bank with this net? What do I want out of this river?

If nothing I want fits those criteria, what's the point?

2009-06-04T08:55:00.000-05:00

The keliophores impede the crawler's motion. With our dexterity thus reduced, the chances of our missing a branch are increased. We may have to rest here until we purify more of the solvent, but the prospect of delay, any delay, terrifies us all.

Corners

2009-05-27T13:08:00.000-05:00

Who is standing in the space between Kurzweilian infatuation with the notion of machines with superhuman intelligence, and Baxterian pessimism about the notion of collectives with subhuman intelligence? Am I alone here?

Sir? Step over here, please.

2009-05-19T09:07:00.002-05:00

If a doctor (or inventor, or company, or whoever) invents a medical device to cure or treat some sort of sickness or disease or disorder, she can't use it, can't put it into practice, until she's proven that it does what she says it does. Why aren't security professionals held to anywhere near that standard?

I'm pretty sure stents for atherosclerosis weren't used on a patient in a hospital before somebody asserted to somebody else that those stents did something useful, and backed up that assertion with some kind of proof. Did any similar process happen before airport security started demanding that we take off our shoes before we could board a plane?

Bottleneck at the Retina

2009-05-08T15:18:00.000-05:00

I really want dual monitors. Or a secondary mini-display. Or one really big display. Or a head-mounted display. Or an implant.

Moot

2009-04-29T09:26:00.002-05:00

When the end of the Bafflement comes, will we be ready?

Ready? There's no such thing.

Well here it comes anyway.

All Greek To Me

2009-04-25T11:16:00.000-05:00

When we learn the alphabet, we're presented with a big picture of a letter, in its uppercase and lowercase form, and shown that letter in use in a familiar word.

Nobody ever did the equivalent for me for rho, sigma, lambda, etc. They just showed up on a blackboard in a sophomore physics class, without introduction.

Is that a common experience?

If so, then physics educators are lacking basic techniques known to kindergarten teachers everywhere.

That's pathetic.

It's like hiding physics knowledge behind a secret door so only the most determined students actually reach it.

To-do is the wrong term

2009-04-22T15:35:00.000-05:00

When I think about task management habits and techniques (which I do a lot) one point I keep in mind is that "accomplish" isn't the only way to get an obligation off your list. "Obviate" works just as well.

Cultural Reference

2009-04-21T10:21:00.000-05:00

I talk about the Pattern, and it occurs to me that it might be confused with Zelazny's Pattern. What I mean by the word might better be compared with the dance between the Pattern and the Logrus in Zelazny's world. I live immersed in that dance.

Divert

2009-04-20T14:44:00.000-05:00

Half the things that my brain throws up for my consciousness to see are escapes. Things to distract me from whatever it is I'm doing. If some conspiracy, good or evil, had planted a program in my brain to keep me from accomplishing my destiny, whatever it is, I'll bet this is how it would feel.

Fashion

2009-04-16T09:05:00.001-05:00

Whatever happened to Connectionism? It was right, as far as it went.

2009-04-14T16:12:00.000-05:00

Layers
Strata
Lasagna of
Buzzing slipslide
Can't get traction
Can't fix location
In the
Noosphere
Namespace
Phase space
Head space
Problem space
What heading what bearing

Simulated annealing
Fitness function

How do you know which moves take you closer to your destination if you don't know the location of your destination?

Gradient
Flavor
density

Taste your way there.

Old Entish

2009-02-02T15:22:00.001-05:00

It takes me a long time to do anything. So, I need to be careful to do things that are worth taking a long time to do. I feel like an Ent. Unfortunately, I don't have the collective history and wisdom of an entire species with similar constraints to draw upon.

Fluoxetini

2009-01-28T13:21:00.002-05:00

The generic name of Prozac is Fluoxetine. It would be fun to invent a cocktail called a Fluoxetini. I'll bet it'd be a hit with the young people.

Take A Breather

2009-01-21T13:55:00.001-05:00

I'm sure it happened earlier than that, but Enigma's "Sadeness" (currently playing on my headphones) is the first song I remember hearing featuring a recording of the breathing of an apparently sexually aroused woman as an instrument.

Now that sound and its variants are staples of all electronic music.

I can't say I'm disappointed.

Changing of the Guard

2009-01-15T09:03:00.000-05:00

One of the many voices in my head is The Guy Who Always Says No. Through some shady political maneuverings, he managed to get himself elected Chairman for calendar year 2008. We're just now beginning to realize the extent of the damage.

A note

2008-12-14T14:21:00.001-05:00

Dear tech support dude with an Indian accent,

You are an intelligent person in a rising empire. I am an intelligent person in a dying empire. I have no reason to wish you ill; on the contrary, you represent the best hope for the future of the species of which I am, after all, a member. I'd like to let you know what's happening here, in hope that it will help you and your community to avoid the mistakes I and my community have made.

When I share my experiences, when I tell my story in a place where you can listen, it is, at least in part, for your benefit.

Good luck.

2008-12-11 stuff on my mind

2008-12-11T16:23:00.000-05:00

Don't Forget To Check Out Our Weekly Specials!

2008-11-21T10:24:00.002-05:00

So I just went to the pharmacy. Let me talk about cognitive load. I'm directing this at the marketing executive who has been paid to design my shopping experience. I drive to your store, park, and enter, wander up and down the aisles looking for an item I need, and then try to buy it. Let me confess up front: I've been diagnosed (by the same professional and commercial Western Medicine System which you are in a very real sense a part of) with ADD (back when that was one of the things it was called; I know it's changed; the DSM be praised). As I attempt to carry out my intended tasks in your store, I am bombarded with words and images, visually and auditorily. Every square inch of the surfaces that surround me is emblazoned with advertisement, from the packages of the products themselves, to the logos and faces on the sides of the endcaps, to the stands holding flyers, which I try not to knock over. Voices, NON-STOP VOICES entreat me over the PA to check out your weekly specials. At every spot where I can interact with a human being acting as a representative of your corporation, the face I see has a halo extending to the edge of my vision consisting of candy to give me diabetes or cancer interspersed with pictures of scantily clad celebrities. As I shop, little plastic boxes protrude from the shelves, and blink at me, offering pieces of paper which can grant me infinitesimal discounts on products I don't need. At the register I'm told I need a Special Swell Customer Card so that, in addition to getting more infinitesimal discounts and letting you track the progress of my hemorrhoid, I can devote precious space in my already overstuffed wallet to what is, in essence, a billboard for your corporation.

And in among the logos and the slogans and the entreaties and the coupons and the Special Swell Customer Card and the acres of glossy cleavage, there is a VERY REAL risk I will FORGET what it is I came into your store to buy.

If that happens, it will defeat the purpose of my having offered this hour of my life to doing business with you.

My (justified) fear of that eventuality makes my shopping experience, frankly, hellish.

So. You, marketing executive, have been paid what is probably a pretty respectable salary to lure me into your store and make me into a loyal customer. And the result of your earnest labors is that the brightly-colored sign above your door might as well bear the words, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Keep up the good work.

"Oh, and stop drinking tea."

2008-10-13T12:33:00.001-05:00

This was said by my urologist this morning after she showed me the CT scan of the proto-boulder in my kidney.

Harvest

2008-09-30T16:42:00.002-05:00

Have you ever eaten a perfect peach? No, really, have you? Are you sure? Most people are lucky if once in a lifetime they eat a perfect peach.

I have a magic power. I have contrived, in the past week, to eat over one dozen perfect peaches. In among a life of cars and cubicles, gas prices and taxes, I have included this superhuman accomplishment.

And I did not do it emptily. I did not arrange it and then let it pass unheeded. To each bite I paid rapt attention, and discerned with intense concentration the papery flat of the outer fuzz, the sharp tartness of the inner surface of the skin, the miraculous flesh which achieves the feat of being at once uniform and smooth and yet delicately fibrous. I have examined the mechanics of the pressure of my front teeth against the nestled stone, and the flow of the juice from the compressed flesh surrounding it. And that is the magic: not that I have eaten perfect peaches, but that I have done so mindfully.

And I send you this secret message, this missive which no other could comprehend, to inform you that this magic power belongs to you, too. Yes, I mean you.

Use it wisely.

Promises

2008-09-23T13:18:00.001-05:00

I can't make promises. Promises aren't how the universe works. But I can tell you that given what I know, I assess a high probability that there is more good stuff to come.

Which Cognitive Vice Is This?

2008-09-16T15:32:00.001-05:00

I have a password that was generated for me by a password program. It's reasonably secure; it's a pseudorandom set of mixed case letters and numbers. It's one of many like that; I generate a new one for each context. It contains, in the middle, by chance, a sequence of four letters that are the same as the name of a minor character in a lesser-known story by my favorite author, but with the vowels taken out. And only if you don't count y as a vowel.

It's an accident. And not a very interesting one, at that. And yet every time I type it, I think of it as an homage to great literature, and hope the writing gods see it as such.

More Eschatology

2008-09-08T12:13:00.004-05:00

The Bafflement is the period of history between the moment a civilization discovers the facts of quantum mechanics, and the moment that civilization understands the facts of quantum mechanics.

Few civilizations survive the End of the Bafflement.

Our civilization is in the Bafflement now.

The End is nigh.

New Art Form: Quantum Scuplture

2008-09-03T14:18:00.001-05:00

It doesn't have just one shape.

The Doubularity Is Nigh

2008-09-02T14:15:00.002-05:00

Huh. Randall Munroe and Cory Doctorow met in person over a week ago, and the Internet didn't explode, or invert, or become the Virtù. So we need to come up with some new candidates for what event will trigger the Geekpocalypse. My vote is for when Randall and Summer Glau start dating.

They'd make a cute couple, wouldn't they? And she could use her mad ballerina skills to defend him from the pixel-eating bands of LOLzombies which will roam the Afternet.

My Cognitive Vices: Penicillin Thinking

2008-08-26T08:52:00.004-05:00

Sometimes I justify my mistakes by telling myself that they might result in serendipitous discoveries. Like when Fleming accidentally contaminated a culture plate with mold, and discovered penicillin. I call that penicillin thinking.

Fake physics

2008-08-25T13:11:00.001-05:00

Attention comes from points with nonzero curl in the noetic flux.

What's the wavelength of an attention? (uh-TEN-tee-ON)

Helping

2008-08-22T19:52:00.003-05:00

Do you suppose that Newton had a buddy who suggested to him, over coffee, "Hey, maybe you should invent a new kind of math for that. You know, some way to talk about sums of infinitesimal things." Would we hear about that guy?

I wouldn't mind being that guy, even if we didn't.

phase-space

2008-08-20T09:00:00.000-05:00

The phase-space of life is riddled with obstacles and currents. Our course through it is not simple. Bedeviling our navigation are the twin facts that we do not know our destination, and that our charts were drawn by madmen.

Ritual

2008-07-24T11:14:00.004-05:00

The idea of the salt trick (the original idea, anyway) is finding the mental trick to get myself to do the things I need to do. Algorithms for human living.

Ritual seems to be a useful tool. The tea ritual gets good results pretty often. I'm hoping it's more the ritual than the drugs in the tea (theobromine? [edit: nope, theophylline]). I don't want to be dependent on drugs.

I once applied the tea ritual to my job, and good things came of it. I'm reluctant to do that regularly, though.

My deep fear, and I think I rationally support this, too, is that if I became successful at my job, I might forget to worry about, and put effort into, things which are more important.

Art

2008-07-24T08:27:00.004-05:00

A bad artist who doesn't know any better will point to Picasso, or Monet, or van Gogh, to defend his bad art. You can't limit art with your narrow definitions, he'll say.

It's true; great art defies rules. This is because art is so richly complex a concept that any clean and rigorous definitions we try to come up with for it will be hopelessly naive. We're not smart enough to correctly draw boundaries for art. Every time somebody has set rules, a great artist has come along and broken them.

So we cannot set rules on art, yes?

Here's the problem: bad artists can break rules, too.

The reason we try at all to set rules is so that we can tell good stuff from crap. We're pretty sure there is a difference between good stuff and crap. So we try to decide what that difference is. When we've come up with an answer, though, it's always been wrong, or at least shortsighted.

But just because we can't codify our standards doesn't mean we should pretend we don't have any.

What do do?

Art isn't alone in this. There are many kinds of endeavor which fall into a problematic category: an endeavor that almost definitely has value, and ought to be undertaken, but the practice of which either cannot or should not be quantitatively evaluated regarding its value. Art falls into this category. So does education. So does philosophy. So do many things.

With any of these things, we end up, at any particular point in history, either trying to constrain it with ridiculous rules, or allowing it to produce huge quantities of utter crap. Sometimes we get creative and manage to do both at the same time.

I have a daydream that there exists a possible solution to this dilemma. I keep trying to figure out what it is.

I'm probably being shortsighted.

But it would be nice if we, as a civilization, knew how to talk frankly about the difference between breaking the rules because the rules are wrong, and breaking the rules because you suck.

Neologism Needed

2008-07-21T11:28:00.002-05:00

Suppose you could come up with a field of mathematics that is to graph theory what the calculus is to arithmetic. I think that when we find a proper understanding of quantum mechanics, that new field of mathematics will be the language it's expressed in.

Look at a Feynman diagram; it's a graph.

What If

2008-07-09T13:46:00.000-05:00

You theists say that there is an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God in charge of the Universe. The implication is that that's a good thing.

You atheists say there isn't.

What if you're both partly right?

What if there is no omnibenevolent God in charge of the universe...

...but there should be?

If that were the truth, neither one of your viewpoints would take us in the right direction.

Why You Can't Use Entanglement To Make An Ansible

2008-06-27T10:28:00.003-05:00

I've been disappointed that I didn't grok why you couldn't use entanglement to make an ansible, so I asked around on the Viable Paradise Yahoo! Group, and got some insight. Thanks to Laura, Meredith, Calvin, and Leo.

Here's what I've got in my head:

In order to transmit information, one party must set (that is, determine) a property of the universe, and another must read (that is, measure) that same property. When each party is in possession of one particle of an entangled pair, neither party can set any entangled state of the particles (like, say, spin). One party (A) can set the property whether-the-waveform-has-collapsed-yet, by reading any of the entangled states, but the other party (B) can't read that same collapsed-yet property; B can only read the entangled state, which is something A didn't set. So even though the two particles might be said to be communicating with each other instantaneously, the two people who have them can't.

I'm not sure if I've got it right, but it feels good to think that I grok it.

To-do

2008-06-24T13:08:00.002-05:00

A to-do list is like a sun. When enough stuff collects in one place, it can spark to life, and produce energy, and fuel interesting processes. But above a certain size and beyond a certain age, its own weight turns against it. More stuff goes in than gets out. Eventually it collapses on itself, withdraws beyond its own event horizon, and becomes irrelevant, and nothing can escape from it save in the occasional random quantum event.

Contraspectivism

2008-06-20T08:21:00.003-05:00

There's a thought I have. I've tried to put it into words. I've tried to write it down. But every time I try, I think, "Not good enough. I'll try again later."

But I may never get it right. So I'll cut and paste what I have now:

Every concept in philosophy has a scope to which it properly belongs. A realm of discourse within which it is appropriate. Free will belongs to the subjective scope, the discussion of what it's like to be a finite imperfect being. Determinism belongs to the objective scope, the discussion of abstract and complete reality. The confusion between free will and determinism comes of failing to keep the scope of each concept in mind. That's my position. I call it contraspectivism.

There I go, making up words again.

Burqa

2008-06-12T14:58:00.003-05:00

I have ridiculed those who force their women to wear the burqa. But I am as wrong as they are: A burqa baffles only the eyes.

For a bad man, a woman modest to his eyes can be naked in his heart, and for a good man, a woman naked to his eyes can be modest in his heart.

What matters is not whether your wife is surrounded by more or less cloth, but whether she is surrounded by good or bad men.

East or west, sun or rain, any man who points at a people not his own and condemns it for the attire of its women should look not to the eyes of his fellow men, but to their hearts.

The new meme: LOLyers!

2008-06-09T10:33:00.000-05:00

In other news, today entertainment industry lawyers brought piracy suits in federal court against three gravestones, a puppy, and a traffic light.

Making Tea Now

2008-06-02T14:25:00.008-05:00

I want to tell you that I've changed the way I make tea since my earlier post on the subject. It's been evolving fitfully, and only reached the state I'm about to describe a few days ago.

Darn Douglas Noel Adams (DNA on h2g2) and his milk molecules.

On my desk I now have a Bodum half-liter teapress teapot, a stirring implement, a quiet kitchen timer, and a 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup. In one desk drawer I have a tin of Tealuxe Irish Breakfast looseleaf tea and a plastic teaspoon. In another drawer, I have a box of 16-ounce Solo hot beverage paper cups and lids. In the coffee nook across the cubeway from where I sit are a spring water cooler/heater, a microwave, a mini-fridge containing half-and-half and a tiny ice tray, and a little squeezy plastic jar of honey.

Here's what I do: I open the desk drawer, get out the tin and spoon, and scoop two heaping teaspoons of leaves into the teapress. I take the teapress and measuring cup to the coffee nook. I fill the Pyrex with one and three-quarters cups of water from the hot spigot, put it in the microwave, and press Quick Min and Start. I wait, worrying what leaking microwaves are doing to my gametes. Sometimes I go fetch a cup and lid during this wait, but I only have a minute and I have to be there and ready right when the microwave beeps. If I'm five seconds late, the water in the Pyrex has stopped bubbling, and Douglas tells me, "the water has to be boiling (not boiled) when it hits the tea leaves." So when the microwave beeps, I take out the Pyrex promptly, pull out the teapress's steeper insert ('cause otherwise the water flows out through the pores and carries particulates with it), pour in the bubbling water, and quickly lower the steeper back in. I take the teapress (caution: hot!) and Pyrex (also hot!) back to my desk and set them on my tea napkin. The tea napkin is just a folded paper towel dedicated to the purpose of absorbing drips, not a specially-purchased product. I'm not sick. I start the timer, which is programmed for 4 minutes and 40 seconds. Sometimes I put the press part of the teapress in, sometimes not; it sinks and thus cuts the number of open pores through which tea liquor can flow (or through which tea particles can diffuse; I guess both things are happening), which bugs me, but then I've heard you're supposed to cover it while it steeps. While the timer counts down, I go back to the coffee nook. If I didn't bring a cup before, I do now. I squeeze about a teaspoon of honey onto the flat paper bottom of the cup. No, not upside-down, silly, right side up. I know that my phrasing might be confusing. I just say it that way because when I watch the thick honey blob spreading on the coated paper, I think of it as on a flat surface, not in a concave space. I take the cup back to my desk. When the timer goes off, I press the press part of the teapress. I pour the hot tea into the cup, onto the now spread-out honey. The tea pushes up little irregular circular ridges in the honey. I assemble my stirrer; I stick a plastic coffee-stirrer onto the end of a wooden stick that once held rock-candy, because the plastic stirrer isn't long enough. I stir the honey in until the bottom of the cup doesn't feel gooey. This involves reversing direction several times. I stick the end of the stirrer in my mouth and pull out the wood while sucking to get drops of tea out of the stirrer. Then I take the cup back to the coffee nook. No one has questioned why I make so many trips, but it's only a matter of time. I take out the ice tray and pop five or so little cubes out of it. If the cubes are reluctant to come, I use the point of the small blade of my Swiss Army knife to pry them. The top of the microwave provides a platform at just the right height that I don't have to unclip the lanyard from my belt loop. I fill the empty pockets with water from the cold spigot, and replace the tray in the freezy compartment of the fridge, carefully aligning it with the little ridges through which the coolant flows. I stir the ice cubes into the hot honeyed tea until they melt. This is enough to bring the temperature of the tea down near room temperature. Do I use the same stirrer? No. I'm too lazy or forgetful to have brought it along. So I grab one out of the cardboard box in the coffee nook, and chuck it when I'm done. Wasteful. I add half-and-half. Too much for my health, probably. Almost a quarter cup. Also, the English insist milk, not cream. Whatever. I sip. Wow, that's good. I mean, really, wow. I get what DNA was trying to convey. I return to my desk humming. I put the lid on. For some reason I don't drink immediately. It's as though I'm reluctant. Or I don't feel I deserve it yet. Or I'm not ready. If I was smart, I ate something substantial before I began this process. I mentally gird my loins, and open a blank page to type into, and I drink the tea. All of it. Usually in one go, sometimes I pause in the middle and make it two. Either way the majority of the tea flows into me in under a minute. I get high. I write. Or something; the recollection is unclear.

If you read the earlier post on tea, you'll recognize that all of this allows me what is quite possibly British Kitchen-quality tea, in an American Cubicle setting.

Now I have to clean up tea leaves.

I cry sometimes when I think that, no matter how well I succeed or how badly I fail as a writer, I will never get to meet Douglas Adams.

Monkey knuckles

2008-06-02T12:04:00.003-05:00

In Ursula K. Le Guin's Steering the Craft, she has exercises for the writer. Exercise one is playing with the sound of words. For the full description, see the book. Here goes:

Sitting sipping tea.
Fussing fingers typing types.
Precise and neat and tidy.
Taptaptap slap ding!
Zephyrs in my frizzy flutter.
Taptaptaptap ding! Taptap.

But rustle crash! That doesn't go.
The zephyr window yawns and not a breeze comes through, but monkeys! monkeys!
Here they come!
Slap not the ding, but handy feet
scatter crumbs and toast aside.
Monkey butts upon my page. Monkey knuckles thump the butter!
Tea a stream, and dripping down.
Tapping typer mouth an O.

And then no more. The window out.
And screeching swinging bellies go.
All grinning laughs and happy hands.
Another cup to turn.

- read this aloud, with an audience

(I know the taps and dings don't match how a typewriter actually works. Bite me.)

Stairwells

2008-05-27T15:55:00.004-05:00

When I was a kid, there was a Gifted And Talented Children program (or something like that) and a bunch of smart kids were invited to come to the Museum of Science on a day when it was closed so that we could listen to lectures about being smart and eat crappy box lunches. I brought my best friend along.

We skipped out of the lectures and went nuts in the empty Museum of Science. It was ours, all ours. We went down back stairwells and found empty corridors and saw disused corners with forgotten display cases that no one had looked at in years. We got to peek into the box rooms and junk drawers of the house of knowledge. Delight! And we didn't get caught!

I wanted to see places I'd never seen before. I wanted to learn secrets.

My friend just wanted to go to the tops of the stairwells and spit down the middle.

Viable Paradise!

2008-05-20T10:32:00.004-05:00

Hey, look, Pam's unofficial index of Viable Paradise info is up! And she linked to Salt Trick! Yay!

Viable Paradise is an SF writers' workshop that happens every fall on Martha's Vineyard. I attended VP XI in 2007.

More Neutrinos!

2008-05-20T09:54:00.005-05:00

Scientists are already building an interstellar Schrödinger gun. And they don't even know it. Super-sensitive neutrino detectors are the death of reason, I tell you.

This is the Great Filter, isn't it? Civilizations get just smart enough to disrupt cognition throughout the galaxy.

(via Slashdot)

Hey, it looks like they're making beams of antineutrinos. What happens when a beam of antineutrinos intersects with a beam of neutrinos? Do they annihilate, and release energy? That'd be neat, since they don't interact with anything on the way there. It'd be a way to deliver energy to an arbitrary point in space.

The Attentiometer

2008-04-09T17:19:00.006-05:00

The two-slit experiment. Schrödinger's cat. Heard of 'em? If not, go read up. I'll wait.

They're important concepts. They represent the greatest mystery about reality we currently face, and I just don't hear much about them. This bugs me. The two-slit experiment demonstrates that looking at the universe changes it. But it doesn't give us an adequate description of what "looking at it" means. Schrödinger's cat was an attempt by Schrödinger to make us see how bizarre were the implications of the "observation" aspect of quantum mechanics. Remember, he intended it as a reductio ad absurdum, that is, he meant to show how silly the superposition interpretation of quantum mechanics was, by showing that it led to a cat being both dead and alive at the same time, which is absurd. But nowadays lots of physicists are perfectly happy to use it as the metaphor by which they describe reality. "Yup," they say, "until you observe it, the cat's dead and alive at the same time."

Maybe if I'd taken one more term of physics before giving up, I'd know why what I'm about to suggest is just plain wrong. I hope somebody will explain it to me, and be gentle. Here's my thought:

Observing a quantum event can change its result. If you stick a photomultiplier on one of the slits, the pattern on the film changes. Can we turn that around, and use the pattern on the film as a way to tell whether an event was observed?

Could we send people randomly into a room where the output of the photomultiplier shows on a screen? And make sure that if there's no one there the information is irretrievably lost? Like, line the room in black velvet? Or something? Then later we compare the films with records of when there was someone in the room, and (here's my hypothesis) lo and behold we can tell when someone was watching.

I dunno. Maybe if you add it all up informationally, you're always observing or you're never observing. Maybe your act of looking at the results is causally downstream of the events, and so always counts as an observation. We know already that the observation's collapse of the quantum state is extratemporal. Or maybe something like Penrose's "one graviton effect" rule holds true, and it's purely a matter of how much stuff gets bumped by the event.

But, dammit, we can see the difference in the films. Can't we? Isn't there an epistemic asymmetry there? A handle to grab on to?

Maybe there's a catch-22 guaranteeing that you can never gain utility from decoherence. They say that you can't use entanglement to make an ansible; maybe it's a similar kind of situation to that. I don't grok it; I didn't study hard enough in Differential Equations. But, if so, is there any way to rigorously prove that that's the case?

And could somebody please convince this layman, so I can stop dreaming?

Please, can we settle this question?

The Schrödinger Gun

2008-03-27T15:18:00.006-05:00

Roger Penrose proposes in The Emperor's New Mind that consciousness depends not just on arrangements of synaptic connections, but on funky quantum effects. (He was on a panel discussing this at a symposium at Dartmouth while I was there studying cognitive science, and I got to ask him a question. Squee!) Collapse of the quantum waveform, decoherence, boundaries between the quantum and classical, that sort of thing. Apparently he explored that particular topic, specifically with regard to a hypothesis he has about microtubules, in his next book, (hang on, Googling/Wikiing the name...) Shadows of the Mind. I haven't read it.

Suppose he's right. Suppose consciousness relies on something like quantum computing. Well, then, decoherence would interfere with it, wouldn't it? If you could figure out a way to "observe" the essential process or feature, you could disrupt someone's consciousness.

It's too bad we have no actual clue what "observe" means. Either theoretically or practically. How do you open the box on the cat? Can we mathematically define what constitutes opening the box? Penrose touches on this; he proposes that maybe it's something like, an event is observed when it's causally connected to a one-graviton outcome. He makes it clear that he's just waving his hands, though.

What if we could causally connect consciousness to a one-graviton outcome? Something like a photomultiplier for the soul. A cascade resulting from detection of some aspect of cognition.

Like say we discover that the quantummy activity in, oh heck, let's just go with the flow and say microtubules, sometimes emits neutrinos or something. Or when consciousness is happening, it has a different probability of emitting neutrinos. I dunno, all you need is something observable. Yeah, I know what you're going to say, but just for the sake of argument let's suppose we figure out a way to detect neutrinos without a coal mine full of ultrapure water. I watch PBS sometimes, too, you know.

So there you go. Point some appropriate kind of detector at somebody's head, and disrupt their consciousness. Just like the detector in the two-slit experiment, but useful.

Wouldn't that make a rockin' weapon?

Meme Grenade

2008-03-17T10:30:00.003-05:00

I'm shy, in a peculiar kind of way, about communicating with people I don't know. There's a threshold, and only certain situations will get me over that threshold. If I have something I know to say, for instance, and I can convince myself it's relevant to the conversation, I can usually open my mouth. That's rare, though, and tough, and I'm afraid in my efforts to improve my social skills I may have somewhat degraded my criteria for relevance.

Another behavior which I often exhibit is what I call the meme grenade. I do this both in person and online. I'll toss an utterance of a few words into the group, carefully constructed to catch in people's heads and stimulate thought and conversation. Often, I'll then withdraw a bit, since the grenade was all I had to offer. More often than not, it's a dud, but it goes off frequently enough that I get reinforced for doing it. There's a little bit of glee I derive when, for instance, a thread or subthread discussion I initiate snowballs into a weeklong conversation.

There's a little subvocal exclamation in my head when I pull the pin. Translated to words, it might be, "Fire in the hole!"

I'm a visual person. There's a part of me that attributes synchronicity or something to the faint resemblance between an old-fashioned pineapple grenade and the capsid of a virus.

The Powers That Be

2008-03-16T21:18:00.003-05:00

So, we just got to see the OLPC talk at PyCon. It was given by the fellow who handed out the first production OLPC.

And I've got my usual sci-fi feel about the OLPC thing, like it's going to wake the Overmind and such. And I don't know how silly that thought is. Even the most extreme position I've got in my head thinks that there's less than an even chance that this thing will actually happen; there's a great risk that it'll either fizzle on its own, or be stomped out by the powers that be.

I mean, how subversive can you get? How futurist can you get? Mesh networks. Pedagogy, economics, memetics.

One sad note, in that extreme position, is that if the big stuff happens, it will also include some bad shit. Seriously bad shit. Mass roundings up of XOs. Quashed uprisings by children. I don't want to think too much about it, but if you're starting to get really ugly images, you're heading in the right direction.

But one hopeful note is that the heroes of these events won't be unsung. The revolution will be televised.

And not so much broadcast as sowed. It's decentralized. Peer-to-peer. Mesh. The fundamental architecture of the OLPC project is exactly the kind of stuff that's least suppressible by tyrannical governments. In fact, it's superbly engineered countertyrranical technology. Someone's been doing some big-picture systems thinking.

I spent some time last night playing a trial of a game called GalCon. It's a resource-acquisition galactic conquest game. Implemented in Python, natch. I sucked at it, as I do at games, but after a little practice I began to hold my own against the Practice level of the bots. It reinforced a lesson I'd learned in Settlers of Catan: Grab resources fast. The importance of a given second in the game follows something like a hyperbola; no second is nearly as important as the one before it.

So taking that lesson and looking at OLPC, I'm happy that this fellow was talking about handing out a quarter million laptops in this first go. Sure, more faster would be better. But this might be enough.

Let's hope the powers that be don't yet grok graph theory.

An Outsider Visits PyCon

2008-03-14T15:48:00.006-05:00

I'm at Guido's keynote.

Totally surrounded by Pythonistas.

As usual, I'm the odd man out.

The staff tees have an xkcd panel about python on the back.

Aaaaaaand the wifi's not working.

So here's a great example of how I think. Just now, an irritating buzzing noise intruded on Guido's keynote. He was going over some of the cool new features coming in Py3k. Somebody closed a door or something, and it went away. It wasn't particularly loud. Not loud enough that Guido had to stop talking. But for one or two sentences, radically fewer of the people present were paying full attention to what Guido was saying. I know I couldn't focus on the memes he was trying to transmit. I'm pretty sure I did not grab any important information out of that part of the meme stream. How many other people didn't?

And what effect will that have on the future? This is a pretty important conference. Imagine a graph of pythonistas, showing who has lots of influence, who acts as a maven, etc. I'll bet, even if 1000 (that's how many are here) is a tiny percentage of all the people using Python, that more than half of the... I don't know the graph-theory term; mass or something... more than half of the total mass of the pythonista influence graph is here in this room. So, suppose uptake of a particular new feature had a big impact of the future of Python development (and, let's face it, on the future of computing as a whole, and thus probably on the future of humanity, and heck, let's be bold, the universe; if you don't believe me, I ask you, how different would your laptop be if its ancestors had used something other than punched cards?) then what memes got into the heads of these people here, especially during that particular slide, is a relatively big knot in the grand tapestry.

If I were some benevolent or malevolent entity (or even a neutral entity) trying to command history for good or evil (or for the heck of it) the repertoire of tools I'd use would probably include making a buzzing noise, not too loud, during the New Features slide of Guido van Rossum's keynote at PyCon 2008. From my subjective vantage, I have no clue whether that event had big import or almost none. But if I hop into the simulator part of my brain and try out an objective vantage for a moment, I imagine that if some real-darn-smart-but-not-omniscient being were nudging history, that fact would manifest itself to my subjective vantage as that buzzing noise.

Ah, crap, is that just paranoia?

I suppose, given the just-because-you're-paranoid rule, that that question is irrelevant. The real question should be: Does this observation give us anything? What could I do with it? What could anyone do with it?

How do I know what's really important?

Maybe the answer is not something that's available to my subjective vantage. Ever.

Alethetropy

2008-03-08T17:49:00.007-05:00

When I wrote about epistemic ethics, I talked about an attitude. The attitude which underlies the scientific method. The tendency to seek cognitive techniques which bring us closer to truth. I wanted to talk more about that attitude. I wanted to complain that we needed it to show up in more contexts than just the structure and activities of the scientific community.

But it's tough to talk about that attitude. Awkward. Hard to explain. Hard to refer to. I needed a word for it.

I couldn't find the right one. I decided it didn't exist.

So I made one up.

Aletheia was the Greek word for truth. It comes from lethe (λήθη) which means obscurity, concealment, or forgetfulness. The prefix a- (ἀ–) means not. Aletheia means not concealed.

Tropos (τρόπος) means turning. I remember in high school biology being delighted to learn the word heliotropism. It's just a neat word. It refers to the habit of some plants to turn to face the sun.

Alethetropy, then, means a tendency to turn toward the truth, or the act of facing the truth.

It turns out that I'm not the first to follow this etymological path; a variant, "alethetropic," is part of the title of an out-of-print book. So it's not really original. But it means something I want to say, so I'm going to start using it.

Now that I have it handy, it's a lot easier to express the following:

The scientific method is an algorithm for institutional alethetropy. What we need now are algorithms for individual alethetropy and cultural alethetropy.

Science

2008-03-08T17:46:00.002-05:00

I once had a conversation with an acquaintance about a television show she had seen. Her description included the phrase, "and then they did science." I asked her to explain, and she described what the people on the show had done, and I replied, "Well, that's not science." I tried to explain what I meant. I tried to explain things like falsifiable hypotheses, and attempting to eliminate bias, and the like. She didn't understand.

Science isn't men in white lab coats with bubbling beakers. Science isn't pointing shiny instruments at things. Science isn't big expensive machines making measurements of incomprehensible quantities.

Those things can happen as part of the process, but they're not what science is.

Science is the courage to seek the truth. To separate truth from untruth. To exchange what you want to be for what is.

Epistemic Ethics

2008-03-07T13:22:00.004-05:00

It occurs to me that before I go on using these terms much more, I should write down definitions.

So, first: Epistemic Ethics. Epistemic ethics has to do with assigning moral value to how much one cares about the quality and provenance of one's knowledge.

The idea is that being skeptical (or credulous) can make you a good (or bad) person.

Let me put it in context: Nowadays you can go into a grocery store, and buy broccoli that the merchant assures you was grown in a garden without pesticides. In a country with fair laws. By farmers who weren't being oppressed. That's called provenance. How did it get to you, where did it come from?

Implicitly, you're a bad person if you don't care where your broccoli came from. If you buy your broccoli at the other store, the one across the street, you get a little twinge of guilt and fear that it might have been grown in toxic waste by slaves (which isn't far from the truth, maybe, but that's not my point).

And yet there's a section in the first store, the one with the happy ethical broccoli, that sells herbal supplements for improving various complaints of physiology. Most of them say what they're for. But if they do, they also have to say "These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA." But that's not a very strong warning, is it? Face it, we've all come to think of the FDA as a lumbering inept government bureaucracy (mostly because it's true). So if they haven't gotten around to finding out whether this particular flower or root will help me go to sleep at night, who cares?

But what the warning really should say, in most cases, is, "These statements have not been evaluated by anybody."

The FDA, flawed as it is, is an attempt to put into practice a particular attitude. It's an attitude that has evolved over the past few millennia, and has proven itself to help people in getting at the truth. It shows up in philosophy, it shows up in the US constitution, and it shows up in the scientific method. It's hard to articulate, and many people have done a better job of it than I could do here, so I will only try to sum up: it's an attitude of intellectual humility, and mutual honesty. It's epistemic ethics.

When the FDA requires a pharmaceutical company to conduct rigorous double-blind clinical trials, it's attempting to enforce epistemic ethics. You can argue, with good cause, about how it's implemented and how the system has evolved, but you must admit that it's done a good job at reducing how often people can get away with making stuff up. It's introduced disincentives for people to proffer to other people junk knowledge.

Western medicine has flawed standards of proof, and questionable motives, yes. But it sure beats no standards of proof, and obvious motives.

And yet people have turned away from the attitude that brought about the FDA. They're forgetting the motivation because they're angry at the implementation. They're forgetting the moral root of the situation. They're buying products that bear the words "These statements have not been evaluated" as a badge of honor.

So, when I see a flower in a bottle, one aisle over from the morally upright broccoli, it bugs me. It bugs me that I might be living in a society where you can be a bad person for ignoring where your broccoli came from, but you get a free pass to ignore where your knowledge came from.

And that's a problem of epistemic ethics.

Foundations

2008-03-06T16:21:00.000-05:00

There is no relief from Descartes's deceiving demon. If I dig at the roots of my epistemic foundations, that is the bedrock I always find.

Given the deceiving demon, what does an individual possessed of reason take as a maxim of action? Reason itself, alone, is inert, and must be moved from without.

Even alethetropy cannot have an absolute foundation. I want to use it as my pedestal, but when I push against it, it shifts.

Alethetropy, then, must be taken as a guideline, a rule of thumb. It can serve as a moral basis, but like any other, must it be accepted on faith?

Bad skeptic!

2008-02-28T16:38:00.002-05:00

There's a problem with modern skepticism.

When somebody objects to charlatanry on the grounds that its principles are wrong, that's bad skepticism. I've seen people object to homeopathy, for instance, by pointing out that the Law Of Infinitesimals contradicts known scientific fact. Bad skeptic! No biscuit!

The scientific mindset doesn't require you to prove how something works, or why something works, but that you prove THAT it works. Double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials (that old chestnut) do not prove that a researcher's reasoning is valid; they prove that some particular testable prediction was correct or not correct. With error bars.

Knowing WHY something is, is a very different thing from knowing THAT it is. The former is deep, and rich, and in some cases might in fact be impossible (maybe fully understanding quantum mechanics, say, takes, in some inescapable information-theory kind of way, two more square inches of cortex than you've got in your skull). The latter, though, we have a chance at, and sometimes may even get a firm grasp on.

But bad skepticism happens a lot. People who think themselves intelligent, un-gullible, alethetropic, or epistemically virtuous, often engage in bad skepticism. When they should know better.

It happens because of a deeper problem. I think it may be connected to the Myth Of Reason. We've allowed ourselves to get so cocky about being logical, that we've begun attributing to logic powers it doesn't have.

Which, if we do not correct it, will make us no better than charlatans ourselves.

Wheelbarrow

2008-02-27T10:46:00.002-05:00

This morning I saw
on Lexington Road
on the bank of a stream
by a well-manicured house
a wheelbarrow
overturned
rotting into the ground under a pile of brush.

We none of us can maintain our worlds
keep them in good repair
and proper order. All decays.

I am on Thoreau's railbed, I think.
And here is a graveyard
on and on.
Lives that came and went.

But produced, evidently, headstone-carvers
who survived them.

Someone made the wheelbarrow new, once.

So what I crave to know
is
is someone somewhere building a wheelbarrow today?
Will someone again build a wheelbarrow tomorrow?

Turning

2008-02-21T10:43:00.004-05:00

What's on my mind? My mind. It slurs, sloshes. It's troubled, but not by trouble. Just turbulent. Waves. Eddies. I knock on the glass, and within I answer back with a smile, and bubbles. And swim away, drifting loose in the bowl. I mouth the words. He shakes his head in reply. This is real, he says. This is us. We're happening.

But if nothing comes of it? So much disappointment. So much guilt, embarrassment at hopes forgotten, expectations not just unfulfilled, but denied the honor of regret.

Slow, slow. And one says that's the way, and one says that's nothing, that's void. Lack.

And I won't know. Even in the final accounting. So the question remains, as ever, what to do, when the answer will never be known. Alethetropy assumes return, not question alone. So if there is no answer, if the sum is never taken, what then? Then, then. Then there is no alethetropy. Only as an exercise, only the subjunctive. But the subjunctive is. Its referent absent, still it is, and gives power. So is alethetropy. It is not something we can have. It is a direction, not a destination. All we can do is cast the rope ahead, for the next. The best we can give them, is that we looked about, opened our eyes, and tried to discern the light, before we let go.

Needle and thorn

2008-02-20T09:21:00.001-05:00

Walk, before you die, among catbriar and pine. Drink their lofty dappled air.

A haze of vegetable steel. Twining vines, sharp points. To walk that path is to yield to its piercing embrace, enveloped, bound, penetrated.

I would, if I could, stand still. Let the questing soft climb enchain me. Become the heart of a swaying pillar of this bark-walled cathedral to the filtered sun. Be grasped caressed gently inexorably by sweet curling tendrils jade.

And my troubled turmoil rot, sink to loam, and feed the singing still forest mind.

Running

2008-02-19T16:16:00.001-05:00

Why am I running? Why am I running away from what I have to do?

I rationalize. I suggest, well, maybe it's for the best, because what you're supposed to do isn't really what you're supposed to do. But that doesn't sit well. First of all, it's obvious rationalization, and rationalization is an epistemic vice. Second, if it were true, I'd expect it to look more like doing something else, and less like just not doing this. I don't exactly have a bias toward action. And I feel like I should. I suppose it's possible that the right thing to do right now is nothing, but my upbringing tells me otherwise. My upbringing says, no, you only get to use that excuse if you're doing something more important, not if you're doing nothing at all. And then the rationalizer says, well, I'm always doing something; suppose breathing or daydreaming is the more important thing? And we go around again.

I also have learned helplessness. And what an apt learner I am. Even when I protest, it's always phrased as "Why can't I?" Never do I suggest that maybe I just could. There is implicitly some savage dark power shackling me. It must be dark, indeed. However I peer into the shadows, I do not see it.

Certainly we can't have evolved lazy. I admit, it makes sense to conserve resources. It makes sense to minimize risk. But there has to be evolutionary pressure to do what we must.

What if that's it? What if we have evolved to do what we must? And here, in the Age of Fructose, there is so little must to go around, action escapes us. We're content to sit in a great crowd, picking nits from one another's fur, and we don't get up to forage for fruit, because fruit is all around us. At our fingertips. Clinging to us. Weighing down our bellies and buttocks. Instead of hiding in the trees where it belongs, beckoning to us to climb.

write-once

2008-02-19T13:34:00.000-05:00

You can't make the truth not be. Once it is written, it cannot be unwritten. You can add to the truth and thus change it, but you cannot remove what is, once it is. If you make a mistake, you can never not have made it. But you can fix it, if it's the sort of mistake that can be fixed, and thus bring the sum of some facet of the truth back to where it was. And, probably, that facet is what you wished to change to begin with.

The universe is write-once memory.

Open Letter

2007-06-22T10:43:00.000-05:00

to the whole %*&# world:

NO.

I'm busy, God damn it.

How DARE you presume that what you want me to do right now is more important than what I want me to do right now.

Epistemic conscience

2007-06-15T13:38:00.001-05:00

What if all this creationist nonsense is a good thing?

What if it's keeping science honest?

Seriously.

The scientific method's great, but if there were no competing worldview, wouldn't scientists get lazy? Wouldn't they get sloppy about adhering to their own rules? Think of Church-dominated Europe, and the Borgias.

The Drunkard's Walk

2007-06-08T11:52:00.000-05:00

Suppose you're expected to be in a particular place, but you keep wandering off. Well, if you keep wandering, and you wander randomly enough, you'll pass through the place you're supposed to be occasionally. Someone whose job it is to evaluate whether you're where you're supposed to be, and who always goes to look for you at that spot, will conclude that you're there, but not often enough.

Now suppose you could take a pill that makes you walk faster. Makes you run, even. You'll still wander, but you'll pass through that spot more frequently. Someone checking that spot will conclude that the pill makes you better able to stay where you're supposed to be.

So, how about you?

Are you feeding your kids amphetamines?

Bumper Sticker

2007-06-08T11:47:00.000-05:00

It's not magic. It's memetics.

Making Tea

2007-05-11T12:04:00.001-05:00

My dad thinks like me, at least a little bit.

This occurs to me because I just made a cup of tea. (Not properly, according to Douglas Adams, by the way. In Salmon of Doubt, which I recently finished, he stresses that one should use boilING water, not boilED water, and discusses warming the teapot and such. I poured water from the hot spigot on the water dispenser into a paper cup from my desk drawer. So the tea I'm discussing here is not British Kitchen Tea, but American Cubicle Tea.) I have this way I dunk the tea bag into the water. A long time ago I noticed that if you pour hot water over a tea bag, it wets the bag itself first, filling in all the little pores with surface tension, forming an airtight membrane. Depending on how the water splashes and such, you can get more or less water into the tea before the bag gets completely wet, preventing any more air from getting out and consequently any more water from getting in, especially since the air, now trapped by the hot water, is also heated, and so expands. If you do it just right you get a little inflated balloon full of hot air and dry tea.

So I have this habit where I fill the cup with hot water first, then lower the bag in, so that water flows in through the bottom of the bag while air can still flow out at the top.

I guess I assume that everybody would make the same observation, and that everybody would make tea this way (when they're not doing it in the kitchen and using a pre-warmed pot). But invariably I see people heading for the water dispenser with the little tea tag already dangling from the lip of the cup, and I have many times noticed little balloons floating on top of cups full of weak tea. Why doesn't everyone make tea the same way I do? I could assume that I'm just smarter than everyone else and be smug about it, but I think it's more realistic to conclude that I'm anal-retentive and that over-analyzing the way one dunks a tea bag is asinine.

A couple of weeks ago while I was visiting my dad, he made a cup of tea. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed him lowering the bag into the cup, letting water flow in the bottom while the air flowed out the top.

The way I think may be asinine, but I'm not the only one, and I know where I got it from.

Tonal Language

2006-03-16T17:35:00.000-05:00

My cat just spoke to me. She's a talkative kitty, probably of a breed that cat books describe as "highly vocal." Non-cat people would just say that she meows a lot. To me, it seems like talking. We have conversations. There are complex patterns of tone and timing in her voice which in some instances are beautifully lyrical.

I describe this not to turn this into yet another random guy's website about his cats, but to introduce a question I'm having trouble framing. The thing is, when my cat talks to me, I swear it feels like speech. It's a subtle mental sensation, as though something were tickling my Wernicke's area. Somewhere in my skull, something is interpreting her vocalizations as language.

When speakers of English think of the components of language, they think in terms of consonants and vowels. But tone, the pattern of pitch in speaking, is also an important component of language. In English, tone can convey attitude or emotion, but in many languages, tone is phonemic, that is, a sequence of vowels and consonants spoken with one pattern of tone is an entirely different word than the same sequence with a different pattern.

Here's where I get wacky: What if tone in language now is a vestige of something older? What if our ancestors, long before modern language, had a language made of patterns of tone? Something primitive, hardwired, less flexible than the language instinct we have now? What if we still carry the remnants of its mechanisms in our genes, in our brains?

I know certain patterns of tone in music have an unmistakable effect on me. Certain specific moments in certain songs just get me. Of course, that could just be an emotional association I've formed during my lifetime, a trivial and common artifact of the evolution of one man's psyche. Or it could be an artifact of my culture, an arbitrary association between a set of notes and an emotion which is taught to us by the Western system of music. But it feels deeper.

If there is an ancient tonal language in us, I want to know more about it. It might mean that music and language are two branches of the same tree, and that would have implications about the meaning of music. Are composers unknowingly attempting to write treatises in a forgotten tongue? Are great composers simply those who got it right, reciting to us deep and moving poems in words only our unconscious minds can hear?

And if my unconscious has a language, could I speak to it deliberately, tell it things? Our understanding of the workings of our own minds is cloudy at best, and our relationship to our unconscious troubled. What if I could program my unconscious just by playing the right music? We try to do that now, we play peppy songs to cheer ourselves up, and we know certain songs make us sad, but those efforts are clumsy guesswork.

Neal Stephenson touches on this in Snow Crash, positing that Sumerian is primitive instinctive language that can be used to control people. I guess I'm positing that he was right, but that the answer is a lot farther back in our history.

I must stress that this is all ignorant speculation on my part. Others, with far more knowledge than I, have studied all of these subjects. But I don't know if anyone has framed the question quite this way. Unfortunately, I suspect I'm not qualified to answer it.

It could be that there is a profound truth about the human mind which we, as a civilization, won't grasp until the right circumstances come together. Maybe we have to wait until one day, fifty years from now, when some brilliant neurolinguist composer has a conversation with her cat.

I Don't Know

2006-03-09T19:56:00.000-05:00

I prick up my ears whenever the description of a pattern or phenomenon requires the use of the words, "always," "never" or "every." That's an excellent predictor that the effects of the pattern or phenomenon in question will be broad and far-reaching. Maybe that's obvious, but nevertheless I pay attention to it.

An example:

In our educational system, children are asked questions. Ordinarily, in the questioner's mind there is an answer or the form of an answer. If the child's answer matches the one in the questioner's mind, the child receives praise. Otherwise, praise is withheld.

The answer which will elicit praise is never, "I don't know."

What effect does that have on our civilization?

What effect has it had on me?

Memetic Transmission

2006-03-02T12:32:00.000-05:00

Imagine a religion which considered memetic transmission its highest priority. It would treat teaching as a highly demanding trade, and might train and select teachers the way current American society does for scientists, or the way it does for lawyers, or doctors (i.e. training is rigorous, selection is competitive, and they might even get paid well). This environment would probably also engender more study of and general attention to the topic of memetic transmission. In memetic transmission I include and emphasize the propagation of memes over generations.

In the long run, this group might be strong. The strategy might be as effective as the memetic/reproductive strategies of the Catholic or Mormon groups.

Come to think of it, reproduction might have to be a part of the system, too. Encourage members to on average at least keep each generation no smaller than the last. You wouldn't want to involuntarily follow the Shakers.

If a group of people treated as a virtue the understanding of and ability to craft a strong human mind, that group might become powerful. I think maybe that was what the Catholic church was doing with Jesuits and the like, but it's interesting that they segregated the memetic strategy from the genetic strategy. I think the Mormons may be doing a similar thing, at least with respect to business and political acumen, and in their case the genetic and memetic strategies are meshed. It seems to be working for the Mormons.

Hmm, the system I'm imagining stresses the open and inquisitive mind, and clear and rigorous thought. Perhaps such a system would be unstable; by its very nature people would wander away from it. Maybe that's why dogma-based systems are so common. But if one could find a way to keep an open-thought system from dissolving, it would probably be able to evolve and adapt more readily, and produce more new, useful ideas than a closed, dogma-based system.

The Llama Axis

2006-02-16T20:45:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine recently asked, on a mailing list that a lot of our circle of friends are on, if anyone knew of a good "historical analysis of common factors that have led to or been present during periods of peace." The phrasing of his question suggested to me that it might have been colored by certain books we've all been reading recently.

Using scientific-sounding analysis to justify comfortably tidy answers to extremely broad questions is hip right now.

Justifiably so; applying thought that is at once rigorous and outside-the-box to important questions is how many important advancements in human understanding are accomplished. It's an activity that we, as a civilization, need to be in the habit of doing. I like those books.

I do worry, though, that they're resulting in a popular notion of the nature of scholarship which is incomplete. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the work that needs to be done to increase human knowledge isn't the big-picture stuff. It has to be done by legions of people toiling away in the trenches answering the tedious little questions that are clearly defined by the current paradigm in their field. The volume of knowledge generated this way dwarfs the few gems of big-picture thinking, and you can't do the big-picture thinking without it.

The situation has evolved such that there are two different structures providing the resources to support these two different types of scholarship. The latter type is governed by grant committees, peer review, and the kind of petty politics that pervades academia. This results in titles like, "An econometric analysis of covariance between Croatian military expenditures and llama herd size in non-Spanish-speaking South Andean villages 1992-1996".

The former type is governed by what large publishing houses think will sell well at Barnes and Noble superstores. This results in titles like, "The Llama Axis: Why People Die".

I suspect that the question my friend was looking to answer would fall into the big-picture category. Meaning that sifting through the mountains of academic papers out there might not avail him, and he might have to wait until Malcolm Gladwell or Jared Diamond decides to tackle it.

Epiphanies

2006-02-09T20:49:00.001-05:00

If epiphanies took as much time and effort as learning and experience, we'd hear about them far less frequently than we do.

Right In Front Of Me

2006-02-04T10:38:00.000-05:00

Gotta focus. No focus yet. It sure would help if I could focus.

...

Nope, still no focus.

Maybe I need to pay Tony Robbins(TM) to put me into a Peak State(TM):

http://www.lynxfeather.net/nest/humor/2002/alteredstates.html (Man, I love Dave Barry).

Maybe I should be like Tony Robbins(TM) and become successful by teaching people to become successful by giving them the example of myself, who became successful by teaching people to become successful. (Seriously. Tony Robbins(TM), Robert Kiyosaki and other success gurus consistently use themselves as examples. There's a chicken-and-egg problem here that I can't quite put my finger on.)

Maybe I should be like Dave Barry and write funny and/or interesting stuff and get people to pay me for it.

Maybe I should do like my grandparents suggested and invent [insert any of a number of inventions which my grandparents thought would solve some problem they happened to be conversing about; I got too many of those suggestions to remember more than the vague idea that I should invent something].

I know there's an answer, here among all this gosh darn junk I've been loading into my head lately. (I've been reading up on anything that feels like it might lie along the path to my destiny, things like complexity theory and artificial intelligence and econophysics. I spend entirely too much time at Wikipedia. Yes, I take anything I find there with a grain of salt.) It's right in front of me, I know it.

That's a theme we're presented with often in our culture. Many of our stories are parables where the resolution includes something like, "That's it! If we don't plug in the Doomsday Machine in the first place, then Doctor Danger can't destroy the Earth! The answer was right in front of us the whole time!" Well, fine, I get it. I'll take that lesson to heart. I understand that it's probably right in front of me.

And yet, sadly, knowing it's right in front of me doesn't automatically render me able to see it.

While those parables clearly present the idea that answers are often right in front us, they don't provide a generalized method for actually overcoming whatever mental block is preventing us from perceiving them. Such a method sure would be handy.

So it occurs to me, in my own quest, if I do actually figure out the answer, then I can immediately discard it and get rich teaching people the Right In Front Of Me Method(TM) that I used to find it.

Hmm.

This recursion theme... The thing about success gurus using their own success as success gurus as an example. I like it. Something's coming to me...

It's like Escher's picture of hands drawing each other.

It's like GNU standing for GNU's Not Unix.

It's like when Douglas Adams wrote the second episode of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. All the ways he could think of to get his heroes out of their certain-death predicament were too improbable. While he was struggling with this, he watched a TV show on martial arts which talked about how this tiny martial arts master could use his opponent's larger size against him. He decided to use this technique to solve his problem, to fight improbability with improbability, and thus was born the Improbability Drive which saved his heroes and became one of the funniest elements of Adams's universe.

Perhaps this is the secret which could lead me to the discovery of the answer. I know there's an answer to my troubles right in front of me, but I need a method to enable me to see an answer which is right in front of me. Of course, such a method would be immensely useful, and, if I had that method, the method itself could, in fact, be my sought-for answer. This is an important realization, because it means that I know what the answer is. And if I know what the answer is, I must know the method, in order to have gotten it (and also because the answer is the method, and I know the answer). So I've done it!

Now all I need to do is trademark the Right In Front Of Me Method(TM), print some glossy brochures, host a few seminars, and I can get rich and retire young.

Well, that's a relief. I'm glad that all this hard thinking has paid off.

(I'm not sure all of my examples are actually recursive. It's like that Alanis Morissette song, "Ironic", which, some people argue, is, ironically, not ironic. If so, I apologize.)

The Salt Trick

2006-02-01T19:57:00.000-05:00

When I went to the dentist last week, it was time for X-rays. I braced myself; I've gotten pretty good at controlling my gag reflex mentally. Luckily I wasn't suffering any congestion that day and I could breathe through my nose. For the first two films I breathed steadily and didn't gag too badly. On the third one, I started gagging, and the hygienist came and took out the film. I took a few deep breaths, got my mind right, and said I was ready to try again. But instead of putting it back, she said something about salt, told me she'd be right back, and left the room. I sat there, embarrassed. She came back with one of those little packets of salt, and told me to stick out my tongue. She sprinkled a few grains of salt on my tongue, and then put the film back in. It was like it wasn't there. No gagging. My uvula was completely unperturbed at the presence of this scratchy plastic contraption jammed behind my back teeth. We finished the X-rays without a hitch.

My mind reeled. There's a trick to not gagging on dental X-rays, and this is the first I've heard of it? I've been working for nearly three decades to learn the mental trick, to develop that mind-over-matter talent that will make my dental experience comfortable and pleasant for both me and my dentist. Early on, it was awful. In my childhood, I spat out bite wings, I wore out the patience of hygienists, I even once barfed on an orthodontist. I was ashamed. So I learned about breathing through my nose. I learned to relax. I learned to concentrate on something else. And after all my searching for this elusive Zen enlightenment thing, it turns out the trick is salt.

I can't help but wonder...

All my life I've been struggling to get by. I can't seem to get my act together. It takes tremendous effort to force myself to do all the little things the world demands of me. I get exhausted just pushing past my procrastination and work-avoidance habits to get even the most menial tasks done. It's embarrassing. It's discouraging. My life is good, but I'm frustrated with the way I'm living it.

I've tried to find some way to trigger some mental state where I get my work done without having to struggle against myself. I've tried to come up with a new life paradigm which leverages my talents such that I don't have to struggle. I've searched for the magic bullet that will obviate the need to work at a day job at all. I often have this feeling that getting my act together will be the psychological equivalent of wiggling my ears; all I have to do is learn to flex the right mental muscle, and it'll all come together. So I constantly seek to improve the workings of my mind.

Part of me wonders if there's a Salt Trick that no one has told me about.

And yet, I mustn't ignore the far bigger question. Is life just a trip to the dentist? If there is some easy and painless way to get through it, do I gain anything by going that way?

Even if I find the Salt Trick... do I use it?