So I just signed up for the JFK 50 Mile race in November, and I've been trying to figure out why I felt compelled to do this. I anticipate a lot of pain.
Then, a moment ago, this dialog from "Good Will Hunting" came to mind:
Will: He used to just put a wrench, a stick and a belt on the table and say "Choose."
Sean: I've gotta go with the belt on that one.
Will: I used to go with the wrench.
Sean: Why the wrench?
Will: 'Cause fuck him, that's why.
That about sums it up, I think.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Chinese censors running amok
In case you aren't up on what's going on over in China lately, you should read this excellent post by Rebecca MacKinnon.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Maybe-its-donuts.org
I was riding the subway today, and there was an ad pasted up, "Longing for something? Maybe it's God." Below the slogan was the URL of the website of the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, http://www.maybe-its-god.org/.
I think, maybe it's donuts. I just checked, and maybe-its-donuts.org is not taken yet. Who wants to help me put together a website urging people to come back into the loving embrace of the donut-eating habits that they were raised with?
I think, maybe it's donuts. I just checked, and maybe-its-donuts.org is not taken yet. Who wants to help me put together a website urging people to come back into the loving embrace of the donut-eating habits that they were raised with?
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Fanatics and addicts
Here's an article that's old, but that I just read for the first time, that I'd like to recommend. I came to it by way of FuturePundit (this post). It's about a topic that I think about all the time: how is it that, for instance, two intelligent people with different backgrounds, when presented with the same set of facts, can come to diametrically opposite conclusions? It's about the origins of bias and irrationality.
Birds do it, bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. We all have biases that affect our ability to think rationally. I often wish that some kind of movement would rise up that would teach adherents to think, and show to us where and how thinking goes wrong.
The article is about a study using functional MRI (fMRI) to learn what happens inside the brains of subjects when they are asked to perform certain tasks. During the 2004 U.S. presidential elections, when diehard partisans, both Democrats and Republicans, were asked to evaluate threatening information about their candidates, "none of the [brain] circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged."
Drew Westen, who led the study, summarized the results, "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."
The subjects were given statements that revealed contradictions between words and actions for John Kerry, George Bush, and a politically neutral male control figure such as actor Tom Hanks. "Partisans denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate that they had no difficulty detecting in the opposing candidate.... Republicans and Democrats did not differ in the way they responded to contradictions for the neutral control targets, such as Hanks, but Democrats responded to Kerry as Republicans responded to Bush."
The areas of the brain that were most active when the subjects were evaluating their own candidates were those associated with emotion, and not with reasoning and logical thinking.
"The investigators hypothesize that emotionally biased reasoning leads to the 'stamping in' or reinforcement of a defensive belief, associating the participant's 'revisionist' account of the data with positive emotion or relief and elimination of distress. 'The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,' Westen says."
The FuturePundit post has some nice money quotes:
"The feeling of partisan loyalty is an obstacle to rational thought. Abandon your partisan loyalties and the effect will be to boost your ability to understand political events."
"Also, distrust the most partisan commentators who defend the leaders of their factions. Their odds of making sense and being correct are lower than for less partisan commentators."
"I feel sorry for the partisans. They are basically drug addicts. But I have greater sympathy for the rest of us who suffer from their actions just as we suffer from the actions of drug addicts."
The gist of the FuturePundit post is that these results make sense from an evolutionary perspective -- that our brains are wired this way to enhance tribal solidarity, and thus the fitness of the tribe in which one belongs. Tribes that had too many independent, rational thinkers weren't cohesive enough, and succumbed to others when attacked, and thus didn't survive. In this regard, evolution works against moderates and rationality. This is still true today -- just look at how the U.S. Congress has gotten progressively more polarized.
What also comes to my mind are the many instances of independent-minded people being branded traitors just for standing up for simple principles. I wish the word "traitor" itself were banished from the world's languages, or at least that it morph into having a positive connotation. (It could happen! Look -- even "the shit" is a compliment now...)
Partisanship, nationalism, and religious extremism are all the same in this respect, I think. And the groups themselves -- the political parties, the governments, and the religions all do their best to manipulate members with emotional appeals to loyalty.
I'm a Democrat, and on-the-whole, pretty liberal, but I have no patience for political advocacy groups of any ideology, because they are always so strident and partisan. For example, I recently signed up to the We Campaign, Al Gore's initiative to fight climate change. I'm wholeheartedly in favor of this cause, but I just can't bear to read any of their propaganda emails. I just don't trust them, because it's obvious that they're so partisan, so I know their chance of being rational and balanced is pretty much nil.
Birds do it, bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. We all have biases that affect our ability to think rationally. I often wish that some kind of movement would rise up that would teach adherents to think, and show to us where and how thinking goes wrong.
The article is about a study using functional MRI (fMRI) to learn what happens inside the brains of subjects when they are asked to perform certain tasks. During the 2004 U.S. presidential elections, when diehard partisans, both Democrats and Republicans, were asked to evaluate threatening information about their candidates, "none of the [brain] circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged."
Drew Westen, who led the study, summarized the results, "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."
The subjects were given statements that revealed contradictions between words and actions for John Kerry, George Bush, and a politically neutral male control figure such as actor Tom Hanks. "Partisans denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate that they had no difficulty detecting in the opposing candidate.... Republicans and Democrats did not differ in the way they responded to contradictions for the neutral control targets, such as Hanks, but Democrats responded to Kerry as Republicans responded to Bush."
The areas of the brain that were most active when the subjects were evaluating their own candidates were those associated with emotion, and not with reasoning and logical thinking.
"The investigators hypothesize that emotionally biased reasoning leads to the 'stamping in' or reinforcement of a defensive belief, associating the participant's 'revisionist' account of the data with positive emotion or relief and elimination of distress. 'The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,' Westen says."
The FuturePundit post has some nice money quotes:
"The feeling of partisan loyalty is an obstacle to rational thought. Abandon your partisan loyalties and the effect will be to boost your ability to understand political events."
"Also, distrust the most partisan commentators who defend the leaders of their factions. Their odds of making sense and being correct are lower than for less partisan commentators."
"I feel sorry for the partisans. They are basically drug addicts. But I have greater sympathy for the rest of us who suffer from their actions just as we suffer from the actions of drug addicts."
The gist of the FuturePundit post is that these results make sense from an evolutionary perspective -- that our brains are wired this way to enhance tribal solidarity, and thus the fitness of the tribe in which one belongs. Tribes that had too many independent, rational thinkers weren't cohesive enough, and succumbed to others when attacked, and thus didn't survive. In this regard, evolution works against moderates and rationality. This is still true today -- just look at how the U.S. Congress has gotten progressively more polarized.
What also comes to my mind are the many instances of independent-minded people being branded traitors just for standing up for simple principles. I wish the word "traitor" itself were banished from the world's languages, or at least that it morph into having a positive connotation. (It could happen! Look -- even "the shit" is a compliment now...)
Partisanship, nationalism, and religious extremism are all the same in this respect, I think. And the groups themselves -- the political parties, the governments, and the religions all do their best to manipulate members with emotional appeals to loyalty.
I'm a Democrat, and on-the-whole, pretty liberal, but I have no patience for political advocacy groups of any ideology, because they are always so strident and partisan. For example, I recently signed up to the We Campaign, Al Gore's initiative to fight climate change. I'm wholeheartedly in favor of this cause, but I just can't bear to read any of their propaganda emails. I just don't trust them, because it's obvious that they're so partisan, so I know their chance of being rational and balanced is pretty much nil.
Monday, May 25, 2009
GTD Update
This past weekend I dug in and really started trying to implement the Getting Things Done system. I just checked the date, and I can't believe it's already been over a month since I last posted about it. The book recommends that you block off two full days to get the system kicked off -- and this past weekend was really the first opportunity I had. Well, the weekend is already over, and I've only just gotten the first step done, which is putting everything into my "in box". I think by now I was supposed to have had everything organized and dispatched. Yikes!
The GTD system is supposed to boost your productivity by reducing the stress of having to deal with so many things on your to-do lists, by setting up a really good and efficient organizing system. The idea is that if you can get the things out of your mind and into your system, then they won't act like little mental parasites and suck your life-spirit away. I don't know if it's ever been studied objectively, but it seems to make sense, and it appeals to me because I'm so anal retentive.
So, as I mentioned, the first step is to go through all of your collected stuff, and throw anything that needs attention into an "inbox". In the book, that sounds easy. But what makes my case a little bit special, I think, is that I'm a total data packrat, and most of my "stuff" is accumulated computer files from over twenty years of half-finished projects. I find it very hard to throw files away, and I've collected a lot of stuff that I just don't need, so my personal folders on my computer have well over 350,000 files (I wish I was kidding). I keep my notes in XML files, and they number just over 1700. Up till now, I've kept "to do" items in those XML files in custom "to do" sections. So part of what I did today was to write a program to extract all those, aggregate them, and print them out - I got about 50 pages.
In the GTD book, Allen recommends putting each to-do item on a separate sheet of paper, but that's out of the question here. These 50 pages probably average about ten things to do per page, so I have somewhere around 500 items total (just from my XML notes files).
The next step outlined in the book is to get "in" to empty. That means going through every item and dispatching it -- either doing it, deferring it, or delegating it. Crucial to success is to get this step done fast, and completely. I'd like to try to get it done within two weeks -- so, no movies for me for a while! (Fortunately, Sonja and I have already gone to see Star Trek and Terminator, and I understand Transformers won't be out till June 24th).
Cheers!
The GTD system is supposed to boost your productivity by reducing the stress of having to deal with so many things on your to-do lists, by setting up a really good and efficient organizing system. The idea is that if you can get the things out of your mind and into your system, then they won't act like little mental parasites and suck your life-spirit away. I don't know if it's ever been studied objectively, but it seems to make sense, and it appeals to me because I'm so anal retentive.
So, as I mentioned, the first step is to go through all of your collected stuff, and throw anything that needs attention into an "inbox". In the book, that sounds easy. But what makes my case a little bit special, I think, is that I'm a total data packrat, and most of my "stuff" is accumulated computer files from over twenty years of half-finished projects. I find it very hard to throw files away, and I've collected a lot of stuff that I just don't need, so my personal folders on my computer have well over 350,000 files (I wish I was kidding). I keep my notes in XML files, and they number just over 1700. Up till now, I've kept "to do" items in those XML files in custom "to do" sections. So part of what I did today was to write a program to extract all those, aggregate them, and print them out - I got about 50 pages.
In the GTD book, Allen recommends putting each to-do item on a separate sheet of paper, but that's out of the question here. These 50 pages probably average about ten things to do per page, so I have somewhere around 500 items total (just from my XML notes files).
The next step outlined in the book is to get "in" to empty. That means going through every item and dispatching it -- either doing it, deferring it, or delegating it. Crucial to success is to get this step done fast, and completely. I'd like to try to get it done within two weeks -- so, no movies for me for a while! (Fortunately, Sonja and I have already gone to see Star Trek and Terminator, and I understand Transformers won't be out till June 24th).
Cheers!
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Snee is for Sneedle
I was studying JavaScript, and wanted to try out doing an HTTP POST from some a snippet of code I was writing, and I so I searched the Internet for any random web page where I could perform a POST and get an echo back of the data that I posted. In one of those fortuitous twists of fate, I found one at http://www.snee.com/xml/crud/posttest.cgi. Curious, I looked at what sort of site this was ... and, oh, the places we'll go!
Their about page discusses the origin of the domain name, inspired by Dr. Seuss's On Beyond Zebra!, a book that I vaguely remember from my childhood. (Text is here).
And when I say vaguely, I mean not at all.
Now, lately I've been fascinated by weird and exotic characters, especially as they relate to Unicode. I don't understand it this fascination, but it seems that the more obscure and useless, the more I'm interested in it (I think that's why I like Chinese -- hah!). In OBZ, Seuss describes the twenty (not 26, as described in the Snee group page) little-known letters that come after zee: yuzz (,
), wum (, 
), um (, 
), humpf (, 
), fuddle (, 
), glikk (, 
), nuh (, 
), snee (, 
), quan (, 
), thnad (, 
), spazz (, 
), floob (, 
), zatz (, 
), jogg (, 
), flunn (, 
), itch (, 
), yekk (, 
), vroo (, 
), hi! (, 
), and a final letter that you can name yourself (, 
).
I nearly fell off my chair when I read that these characters even have their own Unicode code points. Alas, it turns out that these assignments are not official, but are given by the ConScript Unicode Registry, a group working independently to assign codes for weird and bizarre scripts (including, for example, Klingon and elvish) to the private use area of Unicode. The codification of Klingon should be a big boon to Damian Conway and the whole Perl community.
Now, we just need to find (or devise) a font for these little bastards....
Their about page discusses the origin of the domain name, inspired by Dr. Seuss's On Beyond Zebra!, a book that I vaguely remember from my childhood. (Text is here).
And when I say vaguely, I mean not at all.
Now, lately I've been fascinated by weird and exotic characters, especially as they relate to Unicode. I don't understand it this fascination, but it seems that the more obscure and useless, the more I'm interested in it (I think that's why I like Chinese -- hah!). In OBZ, Seuss describes the twenty (not 26, as described in the Snee group page) little-known letters that come after zee: yuzz (,
), wum (, ), um (, ), humpf (, ), fuddle (, ), glikk (, ), nuh (, ), snee (, ), quan (, ), thnad (, ), spazz (, ), floob (, ), zatz (, ), jogg (, ), flunn (, ), itch (, ), yekk (, ), vroo (, ), hi! (, ), and a final letter that you can name yourself (, ).I nearly fell off my chair when I read that these characters even have their own Unicode code points. Alas, it turns out that these assignments are not official, but are given by the ConScript Unicode Registry, a group working independently to assign codes for weird and bizarre scripts (including, for example, Klingon and elvish) to the private use area of Unicode. The codification of Klingon should be a big boon to Damian Conway and the whole Perl community.
Now, we just need to find (or devise) a font for these little bastards....
Thursday, April 23, 2009
JSAN - The JavaScript Archive Network
I've been checking JSAN out recently. It's supposed to be a repository of user-contributed JavaScript modules loosely patterned after CPAN, but it's in really bad shape -- the website has been badly neglected of late.
I just posted this comment to the user's group with comments and suggestions.
I just posted this comment to the user's group with comments and suggestions.
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