Belief in Tigers

I’ve just fin­ished read­ing the book Life of Pi. I per­son­ally think that it’s a fan­tas­tic book and the author, Yann Martell, does a bril­liant job mak­ing the quite out­landish and sur­real story seem so believ­able. I’ll con­fess that through the first half of the book or so, I thought I was read­ing a true story; he’s that good. Of course, that’s actu­ally part of the point of the sto­ry. It delib­er­ately chal­lenges what one accepts as cri­te­rion for belief by ask­ing the ques­tion, “Be­tween two equally com­plete and sound expla­na­tions for an event, which makes the bet­ter sto­ry?”

... Read More

Big Brother is Watching You Poop

He’s kind of got a fetish.

Blackout Day, The Public Consciousness, and a general defense of Slacktivism.

Yes­ter­day, hun­dreds of websites(Including such nota­bles as Wikipedia, Red­dit, and even my rather unim­por­tant cor­ner of the web.) were “blacked out” in protest against two pieces of par­tic­u­larly oner­ous leg­is­la­tion, SOPA and PIPA.((For those whe don’t know, these are anti-piracy bills (in the sense of copy­right infringers, not open seas maraud­ers) which threaten to emplace dra­conian mea­sures which will affect thou­sands of per­fectly legal and inno­cent web­sites and busi­nesses along with the crim­i­nals. Google has more info. )) In addi­tion to the black­outs, many other web­sites posted infor­ma­tion about these two bills on their web­sites along with rea­sons to oppose them. As a result 18 senators, some of who had pre­vi­ously been cospon­sors, have newly announced their oppo­si­tion to these bills. In addi­tion, the sub­ject has broached the national con­scious­ness and now main­stream new orga­ni­za­tions across the coun­try are report­ing on the debate. With all ker­fluffle, one would think that the black­out has served it’s pri­mary pur­pose in spread­ing aware­ness and dealt a pow­er­ful blow to forces attempt­ing to push these bills through Con­gress.

There are, how­ev­er, dis­sent­ing voic­es. Maddox an indi­vid­ual known for his con­tro­ver­sial enter­tain­ment web­site has made the claim that “Black­out Day” is just another exam­ple of Inter­net “Slack­tivis­m,” which will ulti­mately go nowhere and is a symp­tom of the gen­eral malaise and of todays gen­er­a­tion of protesters: peo­ple who will protest any­thing so long as they can do so from the safety and com­fort of their own com­puter screen­s... Read More

Fruitcake

The Masons and the Pow­ells have fin­ished with their lat­est film endeavor: Fruitcake. This is the first time to my knowl­edge that they’ve attempted to make a com­edy of some sort that was­n’t a spoof and I guess it’s an inter­est­ing pro­ject. The premise is that a drunken young man hides an engage­ment ring meant for his girl­friend in a fruit­cake and mails it to her fam­i­ly. After sober­ing up and real­iz­ing just how stupid that was, he trav­els across coun­try attempt­ing to chase it down as it gets re-gifted time and again.

The show is fun­ny, in spurt­s... Read More

Self Awareness

So I read a book. I know. Sur­prise! This book is called Blindsight, it’s by Peter Watts, and you can read it here. This is an inter­est­ing book. It’s a piece of hard sci­ence fic­tion, which means it focuses on the explo­ration of sci­en­tific the­ory and main­tains strong fidelity to sci­en­tific accu­ra­cy. Blindsight also heav­ily fea­tures vam­pires. Weird, yet this isn’t the most inter­est­ing thing about this book. What is the most inter­est­ing thing is what this book is attempt­ing to say about the human condition: That human con­scious­ness is a super­flu­ous, and prob­a­bly tem­po­rary aber­ra­tion of the nat­ural progress of evo­lu­tion... Read More

URI Prefix Middleware for Clojure Ring

So I’ve been work­ing with Clojure webapps again lately and I noticed how I keep for­get­ting what mid­dle­ware is, what it does, and how to use it. This is a shame because it’s actu­ally not very com­pli­cated and it’s quite use­ful once you get it. So I’m going to place here a write-up on mid­dle­ware and an exam­ple of its use... Read More

Your code is not "Beautiful"

I have a pet pieve. Actu­al­ly, I have many, but only a few worth com­plain­ing about. One of these is when pro­gram­mers describe their cre­ations as “beau­ti­ful.” At first blush it might seem strange that peo­ple would describe com­puter code, filled with semi-colons, parentheses, and brackets as “beau­ti­ful.” One might be tempted to ask whether they were just in love with their syn­tax high­lighters. How­ev­er, I’ll be fair. The term “beau­ti­ful” in this sense refers not to visual aes­thet­ics, but to a sort of notional aesthetic: ideas which seem so sim­ple and ele­gent that they pro­vide a cer­tain sense of plea­sure when one comes to under­stand them. When coders use beau­ti­ful as an adjec­tive to describe their pro­grams, they aren’t describ­ing the visual asthet­ics of their com­puter code, they are dis­cussing the pre­summed ele­gence of their solu­tions. They are declaim­ing the clev­er­ness of their own inven­tion­s... Read More

Proof of God

I just bought a car today. The sway bar broke on the old one and instead of get­ting it fixed I decided to drive on it while look­ing for a new car. I spent sev­eral weeks plan­ning, research­ing, weigh­ing pri­or­i­ties, fret­ting over trade-offs and just all around pulling out my hair all the while wait­ing in anx­ious antic­i­pa­tion for my cur­rent model fall apart while I’m driving down the high­way and 65 miles an hour. I wanted a car that was small, fuel effi­cient, reli­able, and sporty. Even­tu­al­ly, I decided that money was pri­or­ity one and sporty had to go, ulti­mately pick­ing a used Honda Civic. How bor­ing… and yet very prac­ti­cal. It’s just the kind of thing I would get. Any­way, you may be won­der­ing what this has to do with God and His proof there­of... Read More

Stumpwm shutdown nag

I use Stumpwm as my pri­mary win­dow man­ager on my desk­top at home. Stumpwm is actu­ally a pretty neat win­dow manager: it’s tiled, pro­vides facil­i­ties for group and be con­trolled com­pletely from the key­board, no mouse nec­es­sary, but it’s chief advan­tage to me is that it’s writ­ten and con­fig­ured with Common Lisp, which make it much eas­ier for me to script and mod­i­fy. I can arbi­trar­ily load pro­grams, libraries, and code into the Stumpwm run­time in real­time while it is still run­ning just to see if and how it works. This actu­ally makes it much more deeply mod­i­fi­able than most other win­dows man­agers (or indeed, pro­grams of any sort,) and I’ve taken advan­tage of this from time to time.

One of my more peren­nial prob­lems is a sort of insom­nia that I have. I’ve found how­ev­er, that if I limit my com­puter usage in the evening and spend a cou­ple hours away from it before going to bed, it becomes much less of an issue. This presents a bit of a dis­ci­pline prob­lem how­ever with me hav­ing to remem­ber and be will­ing to do so every night. That’s a pain so I fig­ured why the hell not write a pro­gram that helps me with this? Stumpwm seemed like a nat­ural place to put it. ... Read More

What Happened to Classical Music?

So… It would seem that clas­si­cal music is dead. That might seem like a bold claim. After all, peo­ple still lis­ten to clas­si­cal music all the time. It has it’s own sta­tions on the radio. There are whole orches­tras devoted to it. It’s the first thing peo­ple learn in most music class­es. Many peo­ple ded­i­cate their lives to play­ing and improv­ing at clas­si­cal music. All this is much more than is ded­i­cated to say, jazz. I’m not say­ing jazz is dead am I? No, (well, may­be) but I am say that clas­si­cal music is dead, or largely so.... Read More

A Lisp Daemon

I’ve been fid­dling with Sacraspot lately and I dis­cov­ered that the tech­nique I’ve been using to dae­mo­nize the server and inte­grate it into my init-en­vi­ron­ment was­n’t work­ing prop­er­ly. This is a lisp appli­ca­tion which I was run­ning with start-stop-­dae­mon. The prob­lem was that for some rea­son, start-stop-­dae­mon was fail­ing to fully dae­mo­nize the appli­ca­tion. The Repl seemed to con­flict with start-stop-­dae­mon’s abil­ity to do this prop­erly and while it would look like it worked at first, once one closed the shell which lisp was started from, the lisp process would close.... Read More

Why do people give Evolution a Telos?

What is evo­lu­tion? Seri­ous­ly. Think about what that word is sup­posed to mean. It means grad­ual change over time. It usu­ally refers to the process which life on Earth has gone through over the past some­thing odd mil­lion-­bil­lion years. Now think about what we sup­pos­edly know about evo­lu­tion. It works by ran­dom muta­tion and nat­ural selec­tion, mean­ing small changes accu­mu­late in dif­fer­ent species and changes which improve the odds of repro­duc­tion of an indi­vid­ual or pop­u­la­tion rel­a­tive to other pop­u­la­tions will be prop­a­gated and con­tribute to long-term, sub­stan­tial change. That is, it’s driven by nat­ural forces and ran­dom chance. So why do peo­ple insist on assign­ing tele­o­log­i­cal pur­pose to a mate­ri­al­is­tic phe­nom­enon like evo­lu­tion?... Read More

Kowloon

In its day, one of the more inter­est­ing places on earth was the Kowloon walled city. Just out­side of Hong Kong prop­er, on a dis­puted part of the Kowloon penin­su­la, Kowloon walled city was not so much a city as it was a neigh­bor­hood. And, it was­n’t so much a neigh­bor­hood as it was the clos­est thing to a nest that human beings have every built or inhab­it­ed. Actu­al­ly, even ‘nest’ is the wrong word, ‘hive’ would be bet­ter. Only 0.01 sq mi in area,(6.5 acres) at its peek, the Kowloon Walled City housed an esti­mated 33,000 peo­ple, mak­ing it the most densely pop­u­lated place on earth. ... Read More

Website Filters

I’ve been writ­ing this blog and main­tain­ing this site for almost two months now. For most of that time, I’ve been main­tain­ing it using a pro­gram called nanoc which gen­er­ates a sta­tic web­site from some tem­plates and source files. I talk more about that here.

One of the things I like about this setup is that it give me a lot of flex­i­bil­ity in how this web­site works. For exam­ple, I can apply a series of fil­ters to my source files to gen­er­ate the final web pages I want. I use Markdown, for exam­ple, to con­vert most of my blog posts (Like this one!) from a leg­i­ble plain text to html. I can also write my own filters: I’ve writ­ten two of them and I thought that they were worth shar­ing even if they did­n’t merit there own pro­ject­s.... Read More

Powers Algorithm

So I was brush­ing up on my algo­rithms knowl­edge and I stum­bled across some­thing that rather blew my mind. It turns out I’ve been com­put­ing pow­ers the wrong way all this time. ... Read More

Produce at least something!

While doing doing a project prop­erly from the start is a fine goal, there’s some­thing to be said for just ship­ping. It’s pretty rare that that you have all of the require­ments from the get-go and you cer­tainly can’t pre­dict every prob­lem that’s going to arise while your project is in pro­duc­tion. If you attempt to antic­i­pate every fea­ture you could need it’s likely that the project will never be fin­ished, it’s cer­tain they you’ll waste a lot of time on uneeded fea­tures, and it’s still pos­si­ble that you’ll miss fea­tures and bugs that are impor­tant. In fact, it’s more likely that you’ll miss things as many issues don’t arrise or make them­selves appar­ent until you reach pro­duc­tion... Read More

Politics Game

So I have an idea for a web-based game. I don't have time to write it just yet, but I thought I'd out­line the con­cept here for now instead.

The gen­eral premise is that of play­ers com­pet­ing in an elec­tion for pres­i­dent of a fic­tional coun­try. Each player will have to court lob­by­ists, polit­i­cal par­ties, pub­lic opin­ion, eth­nic groups, etc by mak­ing cam­paign promis­es, estab­lish­ing posi­tions on issues, mak­ing back­room deals, adver­tis­ing, etc.

I've divided up the gen­eral aspects of the game as below. The spe­cific mechan­ics haven't been worked out yet; they'll prob­a­bly take a turn a day struc­ture where play­ers man­age their can­di­dates through a panel which allows them to sched­ule actions and set gen­eral poli­cies. ... Read More

Keeping up

I kind of hate Face­book. There I said it. Now, I hate Face­book for a lot reasons: the chronic pri­vacy issues, its walled gar­den nature, the shal­low level of com­mu­ni­ca­tion it encour­ages, the fact that it’s tak­ing over the Inter­net, but one rea­son in par­tic­u­lar bugs me the most. Now, I know this makes me a rather sore sport, but I hate how Face­book turns me into the odd man out.

You remem­ber that big party back in col­lege? The one that every­one went to? Every­one but you? You remem­ber out for months after­wards every­one would laugh about some­thing that hap­pened at that party and when you would ask what was so funny every­one would just say, “You really had to be there?” Do you remem­ber that? Well, for me, Face­book is that par­ty.... Read More

The Impossibility of Asimov's Laws of Robotics

Recent­ly, I lis­tened to a story about an Asi­mov style robot. You know, robots which sur­pass their cre­ators and have to deal with the exis­ten­tial con­fu­sion which aris­es…

Any­way, this story reminded me of one of the major sta­ples of Asi­mov’s robots which is the so-­called Three Laws of Robot­ics. The story did­n’t actu­ally make use of these laws but I’m not actu­ally talk­ing about that sto­ry. What I am talk­ing about are Asi­mov’s Three Laws of Robot­ics and why I think that they’re impos­si­ble.... Read More

Time Travelling Vampire

What did you really think would hap­pen?

Does Freedom of Speech cover Pornography?

A recent debate attended has prompted me to think about the issue of just how exten­sive the right of free­dom of speech should be in a mod­ern soci­ety, specif­i­cally whether pornog­ra­phy should be pro­tected under the guise of free­dom of speech. In prin­ci­ple, we tend to think of free­dom of speech as being pretty absolute, that we should be able to say what­ever we want with­out regard for the con­se­quences and peo­ple should have to accept that. How­ev­er, in prac­tice, this right seems to be abridged all the time. We need a per­mit for most kinds of demon­stra­tions, some things such as slan­der are for­bid­den out­right, and adver­tis­ing is sub­jected to such a dizzy­ing array of restric­tions that one must won­der whether it was ever con­sid­ered free at all. ... Read More

Cyberpunk

So, I’m about a third of the way through the book Snowcrash. It’s one of the stan­dard nov­els of the cyber­punk genre of books that were pop­u­lar in the 80s and early 90s. ‘Cy­ber­punk’, for those unfa­mil­iar with the term, refers to sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries fea­tur­ing com­put­ers and com­puter hack­ers. Usu­ally there is some kind Inter­net which man­i­fests itself as a com­plex vir­tual real­ity which rebel­lious pro­tag­o­nists log in and out of to per­form heroic deeds which would be impos­si­ble in the real world. ... Read More

Nanoc, Routes and File Extensions

So I’ve encoun­tered my first major nui­sance in using nanoc. In nanoc, the file­names of source files are treated rather unin­tu­itively and it can be con­fus­ing why one can’t have mul­ti­ple files with the same name but dif­fer­ent exten­sions at first. I haven’t found a lot of infor­ma­tion about this so I’ll put down a quick writup on this. ... Read More

Nanoc and this site.

So, I’m cur­rently work­ing on get­ting my house in order. By ‘my house’ I mean this web­site. I’ve been look­ing for a way to get a nice com­bi­na­tion blog, project port­fo­lio that a lot of soft­ware devel­op­ers seem to have. I decided early on that I wanted a sta­t­i­cally gen­er­ated site as that would sim­plify a lot of things from server secu­ri­ty, to main­te­nance. It’d be eas­ier to migrate. Also, and this is impor­tant, it would be a lot sim­pler to use Emacs as my pri­mary edi­tor if I use a sta­tic gen­er­a­tor rather than a solu­tion like Word­press or Blog­ger which gen­er­ally require edit­ing lit­tle boxes on a web­site which I hate. (I sus­pect this can be worked around with WP, but I’d rather not try.)... Read More

Living in the Moment

I recently fin­ished read­ing the book How to Sur­vive in a Sci­ence Fic­tional Universe. This is an inter­est­ing book, both in its unusual style but also in its strange plot­ting and sub­ject mat­ter. The book is a lot eas­ier to read if you don’t try too hard to under­stand what is going on and how things work in the world that the author cre­ates.

The book takes place in world which is lit­er­ally fic­tion, even from the view­point of the char­ac­ters. Sci­ence in this world is based on sto­ry-­lines and expressed in terms of human emo­tions. This is inter­est­ing but is not deeply impor­tant to the sto­ry. It would seem to be more a styl­is­tic choice on the part of the author, except for that moment in the story where the pro­tag­o­nist describes how the con­cept of time travel (which is an inte­gral part of the sto­ry,) works in a sci­ence fic­tional uni­verse.... Read More

The First World War; The more interesting one.

Most peo­ple are aware of the First World War and have some knowl­edge of its his­to­ry. They know that it was started when some Aus­trian prince was shot and that it ended when the Eng­lish invented tanks and drove them into Ger­many. They know that in between there was a lot of fight­ing and that a lot of it had to do with trenches and machine guns and gas masks and Red Bar­rons and many might be able to name drop the Somme or Gal­lipoli. But, when it comes down to it, every­one remem­bers the Sec­ond World War bet­ter.

And why not? The Sec­ond War was big­ger, broad­er, loud­er… It had clear vil­lains and clear heroes. The motives of all sides were clear and every­thing was black and white (al­most.) What’s more, even though there was an unprece­dented amount of tragedy in that Sec­ond War, he good guys won and peace was restored through­out the world. All in all, it had all the mark­ings of a great story and was quite pho­to­genic. ... Read More

1890's Airship craze.

The turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury was a pretty crazy time. Major Euro­pean wars were a thing of the past (or so peo­ple thought.) The world had mostly been con­quered by Euro­peans and was rapidly being tamed. Tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment was on the rise and new won­ders, such as recorded sound, mov­ing pic­ture, elec­tric lights, the tele­phone… Oh yeah! And in 1896 and 97 men from Mars were trolling about the Amer­i­can mid­west, kid­nap­ping peo­ple and tak­ing them hostage in their air­ships. ... Read More