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Mon - October 6, 2008

TEMPVS EDAX RERVM

Time, the devourer of things (Ovid)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/chronophage

Why the "of things"? Time itself is a featureless, "odorless, colorless", relative abstraction. To say that time passes, flies, expires, marches on, or keeps on slipping into the future - certainly makes the point, but the impression is of a ghostly wisp that flies past unnoticed.
In contrast, your 12-year-old face; the house you grew up in, bulldozed and built over; Uxmal's grand pyramid, a pile of rubble when Catherton came across it; the perfect roundness of the egg you just cracked - all these things have been eaten up by time, and are gone forever.

I was disappointed when I saw that the chronophage clock does not actually eat anything - its mouth opens and closes, but it's just snapping at the air. My design would have it appear to actually consume the clock dial.

Posted at 11:50 PM Read More |

Mon - April 14, 2008

Expelled, which is, I see, the title of a movie

WE have long heard about the movie Expelled, starring Ben Stein, and how bad it is.
But some people might not know how bad it really is. So I'm linking to Expelleds website to let them know.

Posted at 10:37 PM Read More |

Thu - October 11, 2007

Don't X me, Y

The title would have been my prediction for a less witty Language Log post that dealt with "Don't tase me, bro!".

As it stands, the actual post is much better. Mostly I like it because of Mark Liberman's punctilious use of IAST Sanskrit transliteration in the body.
Huh? Sanskrit? The word is saṃsāra ...

Posted at 09:53 PM Read More |

Tue - April 17, 2007

What are all these badges for??

I captured this particular set of stuff from BoingBoing, but many webpages have something like it. This is just wrong, isn't it?
"Hmmm... which one shall I pick? The one I've already been using? Or the one with the funkier logo? Or the one with the double letter that ends in "consonant-R"? (Okay, there isn't one like that here.. but you can imagine the list going on for pages and pages more, "Add to Mokuno! \\ NewsFetch \\ My Squankstr \\ zazzIt!" etc..)"

In the golden age of computing this kind of crap won't be around. The functionality of all these sites will just happen unnoticed.

Posted at 09:18 PM Read More |

Tue - January 3, 2006

Burton for Bloggers

"To this end I write, like them, saith Lucian, that recite to trees, and declaim to pillars for want of auditors: as Paulus Aegineta ingenuously confesseth, not that anything was unknown or omitted, but to exercise myself, which course if some took, I think it would be good for their bodies, and much better for their souls; or peradventure as others do, for fame, to show myself (Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter). I might be of Thucydides' opinion, to know a thing and not to express it, is all one as if he knew it not."

Posted at 08:47 PM Read More |

Sat - December 24, 2005

Four meme

Four
Jobs: Truck washer, tour agent, graduate student, postdoc
Movies (not favorite, but 'could watch over and over'): Big Trouble in Little China, So I Married an Axe Murderer, Trainspotting, The Day of the Jackal
Places I lived: Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, Tsurugashima JPN, Berkeley CA -- exhaustive!
TV Shows: Law & Order (original only), Simpsons, Buffy, The Prisoner
Vacation: Oban, Ljubljana, Death Valley, Lassen
Websites: Pharyngula, Kos, BoingBoing, Firedoglake
Foods: Pad Himapaan, Toast, Chili, Kimpira Gobou
Places I'd rather be: Seattle; Europa (the moon); 20,000 leagues under the sea; a free, non-unjust-fake-war-pursuing USA

Posted at 02:11 AM Read More |

Wed - April 27, 2005

LaTeX or however the hell you say/capitalize/render it

It's pronounced 'lei•t^hɛχ, I guess. And it's distracterrific - learning how to use it is wholesome geeky fun that will ultimately pay off, but in the short term it's made me spend hours doing these things:
•Converting my EndNote library to bibtex format (because bibtex is free)
•Learning to use TeXshop (because bibtex only works well with TeX derivatives)
•Perl-munging the library to get capitalization right (or else it's just 'Nuclear dna in c. elegans' etc.)
•Getting distracted by iPapers (it looks, and is, too good to be true - crashy, slow, and deceptive. You get a list of 3000+ papers from PubMed, but can't, say, import them into a library)
•Getting distracted by LyX (making LaTeX easier? Sure -- you just have to learn a whole bunch of easy commands, to replace all the hard commands)
•Finding the bibliography style for the journal Nature (last updated in 1992!)
•Learning how to put figures in (you mean I just have to type \begin{landscape}\begin{figure}\insertgraphics[height=6in]{fig01.pdf}\end{figure}\end{landscape} ? why didn't you tell me?)
•Rendering, and - it does look good. Totally acceptable. I recommend it to anyone who wants some hacker charm. To really get the full-on old-school experience, use vim to write it all, and don't look at the .pdf file on-screen; print it out each time.

--what's up with the underline-but-no-hyperlink action here? Simple - they're things that you might want to learn more about. But why would you trust me to give you the best URL for it? Just double-click the word, then right-click and select "google search". Oh, what's that - you don't use Safari with a 3-button mouse? Oh well, I guess you can copy and paste or something.
Before I get too snobbish, I should note that what Apple's contextual menu should really do is "google search in new tab" that it opens in the background.

Posted at 01:30 AM Read More |

Tue - April 26, 2005

Why 'Pages' is a terrible name

I'm Microsoft-free now, but there are issues.. I'm using Apple's "Pages", but it has no built-in EndNote support. To do bibliographies, the best free option is bibtex, which is what 1337 scientists should use anyway. So now, I'd like to either (1) use BibTex with Pages, or (2) convert my paper to TeX (or LaTeX) format. So.. ask Google, right? Of course, with a name like "Pages", how can you get any useful information about it? Perhaps there are people who've solved this problem, who wrote it up on the web, with titles like this: "Convert Pages documents to TeX". Well, no exact titles like that, unfortunately. But the problem is that half the webpages that mention TeX also have the word "pages" in them. Why couldn't Apple have at least called it "iPages"?? It's like Googling for someone with a common name. I guess I have to figure it out myself. When I do, I'll post it here and no one will ever find it.
Someone hurry up with that semantic web, please.

Posted at 02:06 PM |

Thu - March 10, 2005

"Normal Blog Entry"

Okay, enough erudition for a while. Time for a normal blog entry in which I say normal bloggy things, i.e.,
I'm going on a ski trip this weekend, in the Lake Tahoe area. I just made a vegetarian curry to bring for the people attending.
I'm listening to "Dear Valued Customer" by Snog, on an iPod, and working on a computer simulation of meiotic bouquet formation, and reading a paper about nuclear membranes.
I just solved a non-fatal bug in the simulation which I discovered by---erudite testing. Er..
I can't help it, I guess.
--
I'm not going to write anything else now, so here's a quote (which I obviously concur with or I wouldn't be including it) from John Horgan, whom I hope to talk about later.

"So far, chaoplexologists have created some potent metaphors: the butterfly effect, fractals, artificial life, the edge of chaos, self-organized criticality. But they have not told us anything about the world that is both concrete and truly surprising."

I like Horgan, and I like pithy quotes like this.

Okay, this has inspired another observation that's been building up. What I really find frustrating, is that for all the insights people have had into human psychology, all the erudite analysis one can do of how it is that a demagogue like Bush can bend the populace to his will against their own interests, we still are in the pitiable situation of not knowing what to do when, for instance, Alberto Gonzales becomes Attorney General. In other words, I (and lots of others) think it's fairly understandable how we got into this mess, but it's not so simple to see how to get out of it. Well, I'll see if Lakoff has any ideas when I see him talk in Berkeley next week.

Posted at 11:38 PM Read More |

Tue - February 8, 2005

Academic Freedom

Pinker weighs in again, not on the substance of the Summers fiasco, but on the meta-issue surrounding it, namely academic freedom.
From the article:

"Nancy Hopkins, the eminent MIT biologist and advocate for women in science, stormed out of the room to avoid, she said, passing out from shock. An engineering dean called his remarks "an intellectual tsunami," and, with equal tastelessness, a Boston Globe columnist compared him to people who utter racial epithets or wear swastikas. Alumnae threatened to withhold donations, and the National Organization of Women called for his resignation. Summers was raked in a letter signed by more than 100 Harvard faculty members and shamed into issuing serial apologies."

When I first read The Blank Slate, one of my reactions was that Pinker brought up a lot of straw men in his discussion of threats to academic freedom. Most of the things he mentioned were decades old. It's disheartening to see that he might not have been so outdated after all.

It is important, in light of what's going on at the University of Colorado, to get out in front of this issue. Pinker's analysis of taboo is right on here: what has caused the uproar in both the Summers and the Churchill cases is not the facts about whether someone's views are right or wrong (especially since no public record exists of what Summers actually said!), but the very fact that a certain question has even been raised. This phenomenon permeates political discussion as well: many people both on the right and the left will simply not entertain the notion that they could be educated about one of their hot button issues.

I think it is a progressive ideal to get rid of taboos and let the facts have the final say. But there are some tough questions here - for instance, since persuasion in politics is achieved sometimes by reasoned argument and sometimes by tactical speech acts, could it undermine your political goals if you listen to opposing arguments? or even if you are seen as being willing to listen to arguments? If the taboo meme is allowed to prosper, then - yes. To prevent this we have to point out and discourage this meme wherever we encounter it, on all sides of the discussion.

Posted at 05:32 PM Read More |

Fri - October 29, 2004

mnftiu.cc

Click to open the latest "Get Your War On", one of my favorite online comics.

Sooo . . . What do you wear to a civil war, anyway?

Posted at 05:35 PM |

Thu - October 7, 2004

Death Speaks

The recent battles in Samarra reminded some writers such as Maureen Dowd at NYT recently of a tiny yet lovely story. The phrase "appointment in Samarra" has come to signify an inescapable fate. (The story also appears at the introduction of "True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works", in The Intentional Stance by Daniel Dennett.)

-------------------
Death Speaks

by W. Somerset Maugham

There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place, I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him the horse and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

Posted at 11:32 PM Read More |

Sun - September 12, 2004

Nonsense

A nice quote from David Hume:

Nonsense flies with greater Celerity, and makes greater Impression than Reason; though indeed no particular species of Nonsense is so durable. But the several Forms of Nonsense never cease succeeding one another; and Men are always under the Dominion of some one or other, though nothing was ever equal in Absurdity and Wickedness to our present Patriotism.

Posted at 12:16 AM |

Tue - August 31, 2004

On weighing in

Carl Sagan once (okay, in 1987) said,
"You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it."

That's good advice. But, you sure wish you didn't have to guard carefully against it, don't you? Wouldn't it be nice if you could make fun of those people every once in a while?
I had a good laugh the other day when this Dilbert cartoon (featuring Dogbert working in tech support) was described to me:

Caller: "I have a prob-"
Dogbert: "Shut up and reboot."
(next panel)
Caller: "Hey! That worked!"
Dogbert: "Shut up and hang up."

Do you find this amusing? Then you agree with me: it would be great to act that way sometimes. When you know you're right, and the other dude is wrong, and instead of being polite and diplomatic, to just say Shut up and hang up. Of course you don't always know you're right, and if you're a bit philosophically minded you're always suspicious you might be wrong, so you rarely get that satisfaction. Then you think of that the fact that you're right and are simultaneously listening to some crap, while half holding out the hope that you might learn something from the crap and half thinking it's the right thing to do to give the other side a chance. This trend is most obvious to me when I write an email, then have to go back over it and decide whether to strip it of the "usually"s, "likely"s, "might"s, and other similar properly included but rhetoric-damaging qualifiers.

But it doesn't end there. Have you ever had a conversation and, in the middle of saying something, realized that the only reason any talking is going on is that you all are engaged in the establishment of social order? Usually it's in a group, when the conversation has been a bit lopsided and you feel it's your turn to speak up, and so of course you assert some propositions that form a logical argument. But convincing people of your argument is not the point at all: the point is that you have to weigh in. Consider a talk show like the McLaughlin group. Isn't it completely bizarre? These are extremely intelligent people, who agree on 95% of the facts but come to radically opposite conclusions (which usually do not depend on the 5% of the facts they do not agree on). And they yell at each other! You get the feeling that if the forum were different - if it were a series of letters sent back and forth between the two disputants without an outside audience, the tone would be civil and there would be genuine attempts to come to mutual understanding. Ironically, these people are probably fully aware of this aspect of their discourse (remember the "extremely intelligent" part). No one is convincing anyone of anything: what they are doing is weighing in. They are making a show of their oral skill and attempting thereby to gain prestige for.. themselves? their tribe? their memes? .. One thing is certain: cooler heads will not prevail, because the meme "slow down and think" will always be out-propagated by "pick a side and convince others to pick it too".

And why, exactly, am I writing this? ...

Posted at 11:57 PM |

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