Journal
Something Jason said made me think that I should try to properly inform myself before responding, and as a result I've been discovering just how truly wonderful Google Book Search and Google Scholar really are. Book Search helped me find the relevant passage in Visions, and working out from there (after some initial fumbling around with regular Google and (really very nice) tools like CiteSeer) Scholar helped me identify three of the papers that introduced this line of research, and got me PDFs of two of them. (I'm going to try to get a copy of the remaining one from the library tonight, rather than paying $30 for a PDF of it).
The papers, if you're interested, are:
Crick, F. and G. Mitchison. 1983. The function of dream sleep. Nature (Lond.) 304:111-114 [PDF]
Hopfield, J. J. 1982. Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 79:2554-2558 [PDF]
Hopfield, J. J., D. I. Feinstein & R. G. Palmer. 1983. 'Unlearning' has a stabilizing effect in collective memories. Nature (Lond.) 304:158-159 [abstract]
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(2)
04:07:42 PM,
Wednesday 12 April 2006
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His Wholiness the Fairly Rev.DrJon has found and scanned the first edition of the Principia Discordia. Five tons of flax!
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(1)
01:00:07 AM,
Friday 7 April 2006
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Harry Taylor: And I would hope -- I feel like despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration, and I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself inside yourself. [transcript, video, MetaFilter thread]
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08:59:21 PM,
Thursday 6 April 2006
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Reading an interview with Alan Moore, I find this exchange particularly striking:
THE BEAT: Let me ask you one more question on my original list about V for Vendetta. It's fascinating that people growing up under our generation grew up under the threat of nuclear winter, now people are growing up under the threat of Islamic Jihad.
MOORE: Well, they think they're growing up under the threat of Islamic Jihad. They're in fact growing up under the threat of nuclear winter. Just like we were.
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(3)
03:35:01 PM,
Wednesday 5 April 2006
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Coincidentally saw this article on the medical ineffectiveness of prayer just a day or two after watching an episode of Scrubs that touched on the same topic. It's like the universe is warning me against belief in the supernatural!
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(4)
07:11:45 PM,
Tuesday 4 April 2006
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Defining variables proves to be harder than I would expect. Or rather, it's not that hard to do, but it's hard to figure out all the niceties of doing it in the best way possible. This is the first time I've really found myself tempted to look at other implementations.
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06:20:15 PM,
Saturday 1 April 2006
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Blogmass Croquet Rendezvous Point
Mike posted this as a comment, but I'm moving it here so it's easier to find. Said he:
The blogmass needs a Croquet rendezvous point. We've got clusters of folk staying at various places in the region, and nobody's terribly centrally located. I was thinking we might meet up for a late brunch or lunch in Annapolis on Saturday (11-noonish? 49 West? Some other place? Some other time?)
What do y'all think? Where and when is the best place to congregate? Saturday's wide open, it looks to me. But I dunno other people's plans.
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(12)
07:55:11 PM,
Tuesday 28 March 2006
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Speaking of things I found while Googling (and of songs), The Kant Song--The Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding--is just sublime. And remarkably accurate, as far as I can tell.
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(2)
06:10:36 PM,
Tuesday 28 March 2006
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I have found, while Googling a song that Gillen had quoted in a comment thread a few years ago, a collection of Gilbert and Sullivan Quotations for Bridge Bidding Situations, organized by situation or by opera. I can't claim to understand it, but I thought I should put it out there.
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(1)
02:35:41 PM,
Tuesday 28 March 2006
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The debate on Iraq between Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway [Guardian article with video, transcript, audio], from late last year, is simply heartbreaking, not least because it's also so appealing in places. The two of them are clearly very sincere in their beliefs, and fundamentally moved by a sense of what is right, but this leads them to indulge in such vile demagoguery, and to embrace such despicable positions, that one is almost ashamed to listen.
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(7)
09:08:17 PM,
Thursday 23 March 2006
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I'm amused at, disturbed by, and more than a little suspicious of this study, which appears to place me as a member of America's least trusted minority. It makes me wonder (not for the first time) if it might not be worth doing a short series of blog posts on my religious beliefs.
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(19)
07:33:21 PM,
Wednesday 22 March 2006
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If you feel like doing something material to make it easier for women in South Dakota to get abortions, you might consider donating some money to help the Oglala Sioux Tribe of Pine Ridge, SD start a Planned Parenthood clinic on their sovereign land. Also to the South Dakota branch of Planned Parenthood directly.
[Update: Planned Parenthood have declined President Fire Thunder's offer, and are planning to keep their existing clinics in South Dakota open. I suspect they could still use money, though--they have a hell of a fight ahead of them.]
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(73)
07:06:26 PM,
Wednesday 22 March 2006
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An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation looks to be worth reading. Not yet, though--I want to have to figure out a lot of this for myself.
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03:31:03 PM,
Tuesday 21 March 2006
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So, as a way to learn more about both Lisp and C (and various deep programming concepts), I’ve been writing a Lisp interpreter in C. Well, first I wrote an S-expression parser, now I’m writing an interpreter, and next I’m going to try writing a compiler. It is indeed teaching me a lot. I haven’t had much experience with C, mostly because, while in principle I know the basics of it, I haven’t had a project that C was the right tool for, so I haven’t had much opportunity to write it. C is manifestly the right tool for this job (assembler would also be good but I’m not ready to face that yet, and doing it in another Lisp would be cheating—I want to get from no-Lisp to Lisp).
I find that, as an educational project, it’s really doing what I hoped it would. I’m still no C expert, by any means, but I am now comfortable writing functions, dealing with pointers and basic memory management, and writing well-organized, modular code. I’m also picking up some useful techniques, like writing object-oriented-style code even though the language is procedural, and prototyping in a higher level language to sort out some basic algorithms.
Overall, I’m quite happy with the quality of my code. There are still some crawling horrors in there, though, and that’s what I came to talk to you about today. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the eval function from McCarthy’s LISP paper, as it is currently written in my C source:
struct sexp * eval (struct sexp * e, struct sexp * a) {
return atom(e) ? assoc(e, a) :
atom(car(e)) ? (
eq(car(e), A(quote)) ? car(cdr(e)) :
eq(car(e), A(atom)) ? booltosexp(atom(eval( car(cdr(cdr(e))) , a))) :
eq(car(e), A(eq)) ? booltosexp(eq(eval( car(cdr(e)) , a), eval( car(cdr(cdr(e))) , a))) :
eq(car(e), A(cond)) ? evcon(cdr(e), a) :
eq(car(e), A(car)) ? car(eval( car(cdr(e)) , a)) :
eq(car(e), A(cdr)) ? cdr(eval( car(cdr(e)) , a)) :
eq(car(e), A(cons)) ? cons(eval( car(cdr(e)) , a), eval( car(cdr(cdr(e))) , a)) :
eval(cons(assoc(car(e), a), evlis(cdr(e), a)), a)
) :
eq( car(car(e)) , A(label)) ? eval(cons( car(cdr(cdr(car(e)))) , cdr(e)), cons(list( car(cdr(car(e))) , car(e), NULL), a)) :
eq( car(car(e)) , A(lambda)) ? eval( car(cdr(cdr(car(e)))) , append(pair( car(cdr(car(e))), evlis(cdr(e), a)), a)) :
NULL;
}
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04:45:41 PM, Monday 20 March 2006
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The hottest thing ever made.
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(10)
08:22:43 PM,
Monday 13 March 2006
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Julia and cat
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02:08:12 PM,
Tuesday 7 March 2006
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Proclamation.
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(3)
05:20:20 PM,
Tuesday 28 February 2006
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Balaclavas, balalaikas, baklava: all so different--all so delightful.
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04:51:42 PM,
Thursday 23 February 2006
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Attacking what Neil said like that wasn't really fair of me. I had my reasons, of course--I don't think the Dubai thing deserves the amount of attention it's getting (and there are other issues that deserve this attention far more), and I'm really disturbed by rhetoric that plays on the fear of terrorism, regardless of which party is using it--, but Neil is no racist, and there is a real argument there, not just fearmongering or simple political opportunism. As penance for my rashness, I'll try to explain that argument in a bit more detail here, because it's worth understanding:
One recurring point in Democratic and moderate conservative criticism of the Bush administration is that they reward those with whom they have strong personal or business relationships, to the detriment of good government. A recent example was the reaction to the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, where, as in this case, the opposition included many congressional Republicans. More relevant in this case, though, is the claim that Bush's ties with the Saudi royal family led him to ignore terrorist connections, when a proper investigation could have prevented the attacks of September 11th, 2001. (This argument tends to be mistaken for various conspiracy theories, but it's really just a garden variety accusation of cronyism and incompetence).
So now this DP World deal comes along: they have ties to the Bush administration; they're owned by the United Arab Emirates, which appears to have some connection to Bin Laden; they don't seem to have been investigated in accordance with normal standards; and they're being given control over several U.S. ports, the security of which was one of Kerry's major campaigning points. It's not really surprising that some people would see this as a dangerous risk, and as one more example of an ongoing pattern of corruption and incompetence.
Want to read more about it?
Wikipedia on Dubai and the United Arab Emirates
Daily Kos outlines the opposition
The Council on Foreign Relations (speaking of conspiracy theories) gives a pretty clear Q&A-style factsheet about the deal
Kevin Drum explains why one might not be worried about it
Google News cluster on this story
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(2)
09:35:28 PM,
Wednesday 22 February 2006
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A potentially interesting course of viewing and listening, though I think it might depress me too much to attempt it all in too short a time: Frank Capra's Why We Fight propaganda newsreels from World War II; Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address; the recent documentary Why We Fight.
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12:50:42 AM,
Wednesday 22 February 2006
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This is a test.
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01:21:43 PM,
Tuesday 21 February 2006
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From the Debating Political Issues At The Level They Deserve department comes this Flash Quail Hunting School game by a friend of mine.
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(2)
02:38:56 PM,
Friday 17 February 2006
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Those of you who used the Blogbot may have noticed it back online again, so I should explain what's up: The reason it had stopped working originally is that, back in August, AOL changed the format that AIM clients use to talk to the server. I didn't realize what the problem was back then, I just knew it seemed to have broken for good. Then, last month, 
kritikal posted an announcement in the python_dev community on LiveJournal, saying that he was working on an updated version of the PyTOC library--the library that the Blogbot had used to connect to AIM. I naturally said I wanted to help out if possible, and today I finally got around to IMing him to see what I could do. So far I haven't contributed much--he's already done the bulk of the work to make it talk happily to the new servers--but I did fix a little bug that was keeping one feature from working (a feature that the Blogbot doesn't use, ironically enough). Anyway, since I'm working on the project now, I've got a copy of the updated library, so I've used it to put the Blogbot back online.
It's not all the way there yet, though. It's relatively untested code, so there are bound to be a few bugs lurking here and there. In particular, there's one known bug that apparently causes occasional crashes--I haven't seen it yet, but I'm hoping to, so that I can try to figure out what's causing it. So until we're sure things are stable, I'll only be running the blogbot on my own computer, while I'm here to watch it.
So, if you use the Blogbot, the long and short of it is: you're free, and even encouraged, to post through it whenever it's online, but be warned that it will sometimes be offline, and that sometimes it may not work exactly right. If you have any problems with it, please tell me about them in as much detail as you can.
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(2)
08:23:53 PM,
Monday 13 February 2006
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The blogbot may return soon!
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04:16:48 PM,
Monday 13 February 2006
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This has just brightened up my day considerably. It is delightful and you need to go look at it. (via jwz)
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(4)
11:51:28 PM,
Thursday 9 February 2006
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I've recently finished reading John McCarthy's 1960 paper "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine". It's something of a classic in computer science, as it's the paper that introduced the Lisp programming language, and, reading it, it occurs to me that it would be the ideal way for St. John's to bring the concept of computers into the program.
It's fairly short--34 pages--and could be covered in a week or two of math tutorial. What math it uses is all accessible to a St. John's senior; the parts that aren't already familiar are described clearly. One section makes some reference to technical details, but nothing that couldn't be easily described in a one-page handout on the basics of computer memory addressing. Overall, it is more focused on general principles than on engineering details. So it's well within the scope of what a tutorial at St. John's could handle.
It also has a reasonable claim to greatness. It introduces some of the foundational principles of computer programming--Paul Graham goes so far as to compare it to Euclid. The Lisp language is still used, taught, and respected today, which, for something in the world of technology, shows amazing endurance. Furthermore, it is conceptually beautiful as pure mathematics: it presents new ways of thinking clearly about computation and recursion, and a notation for describing mathematical functions that operate on other functions as data. Computers have changed the world and changed the way we think, and McCarthy's paper comes as close as any short primary work can to demonstrating how and why.
So I guess what I really want to say is: if you went to St. John's and feel you benefitted from the kind of reading you did in the math and lab tutorials (or if you would have liked to), and if you're at all interested in understanding computers better, you should really, really go and read this paper. And then come talk to me about it, 'cause I'm itching for someone to talk about it with.
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(12)
06:56:35 PM,
Wednesday 8 February 2006
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Tiananmen Square
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(18)
11:17:19 PM,
Monday 30 January 2006
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I've been playing with Indian cooking a lot lately, and it is both fun and tasty. On Tim's excellent advice, and after good experiences with her recipes online, I bought Madhur Jaffrey's Quick and Easy Indian Cooking last week, and I've just used it to make chicken in a cilantro, spinach, and mustard sauce for lunch. Yum.
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06:31:01 PM,
Sunday 29 January 2006
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References recently given props on MetaFilter:
Jay-Z
John Lennon
Thomas de Quincey
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06:10:01 PM,
Friday 27 January 2006
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Equivalencies, of a sort
Imagine 120 calories. This could be:
.8 cups of plain yogurt
.88 cups of plain non-fat yogurt
.82 cups of whole milk
.96 cups of reduced fat milk
1.32 cups of skim milk
.146 cups of heavy cream
.38 cups of half & half
.97 cups of non-fat cottage cheese
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(3)
07:07:40 PM,
Wednesday 25 January 2006
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Molly Ivins says something that's been on my mind a lot lately, too.
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(7)
05:47:59 PM,
Wednesday 25 January 2006
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What have I become,
my Swedish friend?
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(1)
11:14:45 AM,
Sunday 22 January 2006
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I made this for dinner tonight, and I must say, I'm very happy with it.
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(5)
01:29:24 AM,
Saturday 21 January 2006
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As Julia mentioned, we got a PlayStation 2 recently, and, of course, a TV to plug it into. I ran into a bit of confusion while setting it up, though. I plugged everything in properly--that was easy enough. I hit the power button on the TV, and a little green light came on. I hit the power button on the PS2, and it turned on, but... nothing happened. I turned off the PS2. I checked the cables. I hit the power button on the TV twice more, to power cycle it. I turned the PS2 back on. Still nothing. I looked for some sort of big Don't Do Anything When This Switch Is On switch on the back of the TV, like the one at St. John's had. Nothing. Finally, almost in despair, I consulted the manual.
It was really quite simple, of course.
The green light on the front of the TV? The one that turned green when I hit the power button, and then turned off when I hit the power button again?
That is the "Stand-By Light". That light indicates that the television is turned off.
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(5)
03:42:47 PM,
Monday 16 January 2006
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In the window of one of the realtors I pass on the way to work, among the pictures of houses for sale, is one labelled "THE MOST AFFORDABLE CONDOMINIUM IN HEALDSBURG!"
10 points to whoever comes closest to guessing how much it costs.
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(13)
11:14:23 AM,
Sunday 15 January 2006
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Speaking of Ana Marie Cox's departure from Wonkette, there's an interview with her in Reason that I enjoyed. I think it reveals a lot about why she was so good about running that blog.
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(3)
06:57:19 PM,
Friday 6 January 2006
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