Short Notes

An old, sporadic log

Posted by fiddlemath on July 12, 2009

Pungenday, 47 Confusion 3175

If you don’t try, you can’t win. This we know; this we understand. More importantly: if you don’t try, you can’t fail informatively.

Setting Orange, 37 Discord 3175

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

Sweetmorn, 33 Discord 3175

Until you think about the counterfactuals, you don’t understand the facts.

Pungenday, 30 Discord 3175

A clean semantics has the advantage of making clear which issues are fundamental and which are implementation accidents or optimizations.

  • Luca Cardelli, A Semantics of Multiple Inheritance. 1988.

Prickle-Prickle, 1 Discord 3175

I just finished reading The Man Who Was Thursday. I can’t meaningfully summarize what it’s about, or why I like it, or even entirely how I feel about it. But it’s definitely worth reading.

Prickle-Prickle, 49 Chaos 3175

Asshole magicians make audiences disappear.

Boomtime, 47 Chaos 3175

The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

Prickle-Prickle, 29 Chaos 3175

No is for wimps. No is for pussies. No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message.

Prickle-Prickle, 19 Chaos 3175

Just a bunch of links, roughly in descending order of what I think is awesome right now.

Raymond Smullyan, Planet Without Laughter. A brilliantly reasoned defense of the unreasonable. Read this.

Philip Pullman, Miss Goddard’s Grave. (Was insightful and clarifying; link is dead now.)

Zen and the Art of Hacking. A probably-flawed approach that nearly gets at a matter profound and vital.

Prickle-Prickle, 19 Chaos 3175

Irony is either spoken flinchingly to avoid discomfort, or bitterly and humorously to accept discomfort, or playfully and joyously just for the hell of it. Maybe there are other ways, but these I know.

When flinching irony is several layers deep, it has been folded up to fit into the speaker’s comfortable space, like paper folded into the bottom of a box.

Pungenday, 18 Chaos 3175

Twitchy eyelid!

Pungenday, 61 The Aftermath 3174

For what it’s worth, this strip actively haunts my thoughts.

Sweetmorn, 44 The Aftermath 3174

We have always been at peace with the Joshua of six months past.
We have always been at war with the Joshua of six months hence.

Boomtime, 25 The Aftermath 3174

From Zorn’s Lemon:

travitch: Whee perl

wrharris: I’ll bet when they opened Pandora’s Box you just sat there clapping, openly musing “Sweet, this could be fun.”

Sweetmorn, 14 The Aftermath 3174

Trying tonight to work in the lab at home, without distracting Josh from his homework. But we easily distract each other. He’ll mention something small and innocuous, and that’ll bring something to mind for me to say, etcetera. And poof, half an hour is gone: enjoyably, but not productively.

So, tonight, all I’m saying to Josh is “Your Mother.” It seems effective.

Prickle-Prickle, 12 The Aftermath 3174

I can see how twitter can be a good idea. But it’s just not worth the time, or the attention. And don’t start about “partial attention;” I find I don’t work that way.

Sweetmorn, 60 Confusion 3174

ALSA, recording, mic, microphone, alsamixer:

A dashed line under a mixer, in alsamixer, means that there’s actually a toggle there. Highlight it and press the space bar to activate that control.

This took me hours and hours to figure out. I have shame.

Pungenday, 52 Confusion 3174

To Facebook, YouTube, Google Apps, and whomever else it may concern:

The Web Is Not The Internet. The Web Is Not The Internet. The Web Is Not The Internet. The Web Is Not The Internet. The Web Is Not The Internet.

Signed,

  • Matt Elder, concerned netizen.

Setting Orange, 39 Confusion 3174

On Teaching Object-Orientation to First-Time Programmers:

new Math();

  • Tristan Ravitch

Setting Orange, 34 Confusion 3174

Freedom!

It’s a damn good idea!

Setting Orange, 24 Confusion 3174

Addictive things have to be treated as if they were sentient adversaries - as if there were a little man in your head always cooking up the most plausible arguments for doing whatever you’re trying to stop doing. If you leave a path to it, he’ll find it.

Sweetmorn, 63 Discord 3174

I like to Think, and I like to Make Things. This a fundamental part of my identity. I had for several days (Weeks? Months?) forgotten this.

Note to self: don’t do that.

Boomtime, 44 Discord 3174

Humorbot is programmed to detect and produce humor through ambiguous utterances. Humorbot possesses mechanical folly. Humorbot has no ruth.

Boomtime, 34 Discord 3174

At the shop of notions, you can get false facts, meaningless facts, or false and meaningless facts for cheap. They’ve got lots of false and true facts, but they’re expensive. In the vault in the back, they even have true and meaningless facts, for which entire civilations scrimp and save and pay on installment.

Prickle-Prickle, 16 Discord 3174

There are currently pictures of five things on my camera. Three of them are whiteboards.

Me: What does this say about me?
David Malec: You’re around blackboards sometimes?

Pungenday, 10 Discord 3174

Stuck? Brainstorm for an hour.

Setting Orange, 55 Chaos 3174

You can’t play optimally unless you know all the rules. No one knows all the rules.

Pungenday, 48 Chaos 3174

Read Pay for the Printer, a short story by Philip K. Dick.

Prickle-Prickle, 44 Chaos 3174

On order and chaos: You need both a carrier wave and modulation to have a signal; you need both a rhythm and a melody to have a song.

Setting Orange, 30 Chaos 3174

Awkward but fresh is almost always better than comfortable and stale.

Pungenday, 23 Chaos 3174

The internet is your friend. But it can’t keep a secret.

Setting Orange, 73 The Aftermath 3173

My folks got me a six-pack of Blenheim Ginger Ale for when I came home to visit. It is delicious. I’m too wimpy for Hot; I prefer what they call “mild”, which is plenty spicy enough. So, I wonder what it’d cost to keep Blenheim Ginger Ale around at Madison… *interwebs*

It’s bottled only in South Carolina, so I’d have to get it shipped to Madison to keep it around all the time. Also, they’re a bit expensive even locally; shipped, they’re $42.50 for a 24-pack.

It’d be worth it. I can easily stretch a 24-pack across a semester, at a one or so a week, and probably a couple extra when around finals.

Pungenday, 71 The Aftermath 3173

I found a cheat code for Pandora. If you type “Mogwai” into the “Enter artist name” box, it gives you nothing but awesome music.

Pungenday, 71 The Aftermath 3173

I’ve subscribed to The Economist for a few months now. Since I don’t watch TV anymore, and rarely read about actual news-worthy events online, it’s a really great way to stay informed about the state of the world.

Thus, I read this editorial on terrorism and civil liberties a few months ago. It’s worth grokking.

Prickle-Prickle, 37 Bureaucracy 3173

Notice: Tend the Fire.

Prickle-Prickle, 55 Bureaucracy 3173

I mean, I understand the utility of object-oriented programming, and C++ really does compile down fast. And I understand the utility of all of the tools that support it.

But I just declared a list< set <Node *>* >::iterator.

From now until I find a better language, I’m using D for OOP projects that require speed, and Python for OOP projects that don’t. (Until I find the time to really get comfortable with, say, Haskell, or OCaml.)

Prickle-Prickle, 45 Bureaucracy 3173

It is 6:20 am, I’ve consumed lots of caffeine, and the spaced-out techno web radio is singing lyrics relevant to my programming research, on which I’m thinking and writing and organizing right now. “What happens … between simplicity … and complexity”

Life is surreal and beautiful.

Setting Orange, 64 Confusion 3173

You have a double-n set of dominoes, where n is some positive integer. That is, you have a set of dominoes which contains every possible pair of integers from 0 to n inclusive, plus every double from 0|0 to n|n. Connecting dominoes end-to-end, only connecting ends with equal values, can you make a simple loop out of the entire double-n set? Prove it possible or impossible for every n.

Pungenday, 62 Confusion 3173

Robot daisies: animatronic phototropic cartoon flowers.

Cute, cartoonish smilie-flowers. They’re solar-powered, and they slowly turn towards the brightest available light. The smile goes from content in dim light to utterly blissful in bright light. In direct sunlight, the blossom visibly rotates to and fro. When low or out of power, they wilt, as a result of being unable to power the little motors or servos or whatnot in the stem.

Now, if these existed, I wouldn’t actually buy one. But they’d be impressively cute.

Pungenday, 43 Confusion 3173

Much as Zarfhome did, several years ago, the site of _why reminds me that I crave making awesome things, and haven’t been doing it, and I have fewer excuses than most. I mean, I turned 23 yesterday; I suppose I ought to think of myself as an adult. For some reason, this corresponds in my head with making awesome stuff.

Pungenday, 68 Chaos 3173

Sometimes I worry I’m crazy. Sometimes I worry I’m not.

Sweetmorn, 51 Chaos 3173

Cam home today around 9 pm, after about 12 straight hours of classes and classwork. Brain was too tired to design programs or try to play Go. Not too tired, however, to break out the violin and play for a few hours.

And that’s how I found the Mutopia Project. It’s a repository for public domain and copyleft sheet music of high quality. I found the Eccles Sonata in G major, which is quite nice. Not too hard, but difficult enough to be fun to play while I get the violin back under my fingertips. Surprisingly, it hasn’t strayed too far.

Setting Orange, 50 Chaos 3173

Complexity! Ambiguity! Uncertainty!

Dance! Dance! Dance!

Pungenday, 43 Chaos 3173

The world would be a better place if, say, elementary schools, government programs, and other soul-crushing bureaucracies had the following warning:

Warning: Spiritual desiccant. Do Not Eat.

Pungenday, 43 Chaos 3173

As lawyers love to forget, our system for defending rights such as fair use is astonishingly bad. […] It costs too much, it delivers too slowly, and what it delivers often has little connection to the justice underlying the claim. The legal system may be tolerable for the very rich. For everyone else, it is an embarrassment to a tradition that prides itself on the rule of law.

  • Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture, p 187

Prickle-Prickle, 29 Chaos 3173

I prefer being right to being happy.

I just realized this today, and I’ve never framed the thought before. It’s probably the difference between what I’ve always assumed was normal for people and what’s actually normal for people. Suddenly, people make an awful lot more sense.

Pungenday, 28 Chaos 3173

Choose again, for the price of freedom is the responsibility to do your own thinking. Choose again, for the danger of mindless mindlessness outweighs the struggle of mindfulness. Choose again, for cultures, ideas, and personalities all die when they cannot change. Choose again, even if your choice will remain.

Sweetmorn, 26 Chaos 3173

Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read. Forget I mentioned it. This song has no message. Rise for the flag salute.

  • Frank Zappa, liner notes for song “Hungry Freaks Daddy” on the album Freak Out!

Boomtime, 22 Chaos 3173

Creative work is always a conversation. Or it doesn’t happen.

Boomtime, 22 Chaos 3173

A Reminder:

Frank Zappa, public key cryptography, Robert Heinlein, space exploration, friendship.

Bach, the open-source movement, Buckminster Fuller, Principia Discordia, Kim Stanley Robinson, freedom.

Dreaming.

They Might Be Giants, the hope of unification of quantum and relativistic physics, computers, sex, the Internet, burritos.

The Books, Python, love, frisbee.

Prickle-Prickle, 72 Aftermath 3172

The rlwrap command wraps a command and has it use the readline package for interactive use. (The readline package is what makes it possible to, say, press the up arrow and get your last entry, among other things.) This is a major win when you’re writing or using small interactive programs.

(This is on Unix systems. Everything I discuss here is on Linux. I don’t willingly live in places I can’t hack.)

Setting Orange, 68 Aftermath 3172

Bill: I hear that mathematicians have very dry senses of humor. Is this true?
Me: No.

Setting Orange, 68 Aftermath 3172

Among other things, Paul Graham writes dense, readable essays on programming, learning, thinking, and business. I like them much too much.

I love stuff like this: he talks about the neat ideas that interest him, with clarity and insight. And he doesn’t peg my bogosity meter!

Setting Orange, 68 Aftermath 3172

The most frustrating part of rejecting facile claims when you see that they’re wrong is that it tends to leave you angry, but not angry at people. Angry at protocol, or angry at established truths, or angry at social epiphenomena. Being angry at stuff that won’t reply when you shout at it: utterly unsatisfying. Also, hard to defeat.

Prickle-Prickle, 62 Aftermath 3172

The only way to make clothing that cannot be legally bootlegged is to print copyrighted and trademarked words on it; once you have taken that step, the clothing itself doesn’t really matter, and so a t-shirt is as good as anything else. T-shirts with expensive words on them are now the insignia of the upper class. T-shirts with cheap words, or no words at all, are for the commoners.

Prickle-Prickle, 62 Aftermath 3172

It’s not terribly thought-provoking, but Gamma Bros may be the single best Flash game I’ve ever played. Good gameplay and good production.

Setting Orange, 58 Aftermath 3172

Tinkertoys are Turing-complete.

Setting Orange, 58 Aftermath 3172

The Perils of Obedience. Note well the last few paragraphs. How should this change the way we view the consequences of our actions? We must learn, somehow, to see that the forest is composed of the trees; and that the whole forest is different if the trees change.

Setting Orange, 58 Aftermath 3172

I’ve just made this note-taking system. I admit I’m far more excited about it than I should reasonably be. On the other hand, it makes what’s effectively blogging nearly as easy as creating a short text file, which I do all the time.