fractalnavel

erdos number auction

i was just going to let this one go, but i thought i would aid the “research” in my tiny way, if it's ever tracked this far:

• received a link to the seller's main blog page via email (from a sister in maryland) about 30 minutes before the auction ended (interesting how someone swooped in and scarfed up the winning bid at the last second - literally)
• sent the email to one person (craig), with an additional link to the auction itself
• sorry, i can't trace anything second-order.

then of course, there's this here blog entry.

in some sense anyone who participates informally in this “project” by posting, viewing, etc. is also a “collaborator” (distinuguish that from “datum” - ? but certainly not “coauthor“).  maybe we can define a “soft erdos number”, and grant ourselves fives.  ah, well, any generalization of association and metric will do. 

but, seeing as how this guy attracted the attention of erdos-2 folks, seems he could attempt to attract them into the deal, thereby bumping down all associated numbers.

i haven't looked, but surely there are erdos number calculators out there.  enter a name, get a number - ?  at least one approach to this would be to chain searches through online citation indices, but i'm sure that's the first thing you run into on the research sites.

anyway, interesting stuff to ponder, especially propagation and value considerations.  caused me to dig back into my own email archives of loosely related thinking.  like, whatever happened to my “history project” ?

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extend the thought in that last post into the realm of human affairs, in historical and psychological terms.

our predictions are innaccurate

i remember being at space camp (so long ago now), and one guest lecturer was the guy who designed the lunar rover.  he seemed to be in his retirement years at the time, cool guy.  near the end of his talk, when he must have been discussing future developments (i can't remember now), he made some comments regarding the idiosyncracies of the human ability to predict future events.  he drew a quick graph with two lines, approx. y=x and y=e^x (e^x-x-1, sort of), and claimed humans saw things linearly while the world (specifically, technology) developed exponentially, and that was why we tend to overestimate things in the short run and underestimate them in the long.

that has made a lot of sense to me over the years, and explains a lot.  but now the thought has just ocurred to me that he may have had the relationship correct, but perhaps not the shape of the curves.  going by observations similar to those made in the last post on how we see differing levels of detail, it would make more sense to represent human predictive (cognitive, planning, perception, etc.) powers as at best logarithmic, perhaps something even reaching a level aymptote. the technology curve can be anything maintaining the same behavior of crossing with the prediction line - even linear, or sub-linear.

some alternative relationships

of course, things aren't that simple, but to a first approximation, not bad.  there could still be non-monotonic effects, multiple crossings, etc., but the essentials seem correct.

it also now occurs to me to consider the significance of the crossing point itself.  it represents a sort of cognitive focal point, in this case temporal, but this concept can be extended to other functional domains as well.  this point is where human predictive powers are at their optimal value.  that should perhaps say something to us about our socio-polital-economic endeavours, this location of our best-guess horizon.  it speaks to the problems of both short- and far- sightedness.

these curves are really moving targets, where it would seem we always exist in a state of near-term over-expectation and long term planning and vision deficit.  and of course the crossing horizon is not constant either, so it would be difficult at best to try and intentionally consistently operate at our “best planning distance“, although that would be interesting to try.  i'm not sure exactly what that would mean.

also to be considered is the possibility that these curves don't cross at all.  perhaps they only achieve a closest approach. the continuing corrective influence seems to be a type of successive approximation, and in general we could find ourselves, in some sense, on either side of the crossing.  but the situation could also exist where these approximations no longer work, and the curves could begin to diverge ever farther.  being above the development curve on a diverging path represents increasing fantasy, while being below represents a sort of cognitive oppression.  in both cases such non-adaptiveness to reality represents a type of insanity. 

and reality has a way of taking such a situation into its own hands.  think: stock market bubbles for a fantasy correction, revolutions for an oppression correction.  depending on the scale and realm where such corrections take place, the effects can be more or less catastrophic. 

so the lesson is to try and detect and characterize such divergences before nature does it for us. and the focal point concept seems an interesting way to think about topics such as happiness and optimal management strategies, among many other applications.  often common sense, to be sure, but now placed on a common theoretical foundation. 

anyway, just one more item for the creative problem solving utility belt.

future tasks: empirically determine these curves.  and note that having the predictive and actual curves cross at the initial point, the present moment in time, is stating that we are accurately aware of current reality.  as this is probably not the case in the real, non-ideal world, the curves should not cross here.

finally, what does this approach result in when applied to the past rather than the future ?  it seems doubtful that it would be time symmetric, at least at small scales.  but, contrary to the popular perspective that the past is set and unchanging while the future is completely indeterminate (fatalism notwithstanding), there is both uncertainty in the past and certainty in the future.  in fact, at large scales, the past and future are pretty much equivalent in these terms.  this has significance with respect to information theory and the nature of “records”, entropy and time.

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managing perfmon log graphs is a pain in the ass.  i want to be able to  monitor both transient and long term trends, but that requires setting up a spearate chart for each time scale. yuk.

so how about an adaptive time axis ?  something more or less reverse-logartihmic (or hyperbolic ?) - ie, finer grained for more recent data.  either the entire axis can be continuously scaled, or every time data on a fine-grained scale reaches the end of the chart, the next coarser grain scale is established / added to on the left.  no more wrap-around charting that loses data, and no more need for multiple charts. 

the data can then be left as is, or chart last / first / averaged or some other smoothing approach representing the data in the more compresssed / coarser intervals. (this makes sense in the discrete case; for a continuous scale, a sliding interval can be used)

the successive scale parameters can be left as defaults (equal interval log 10, or years/days/hours/minutes/seconds), or manipulated in various ways (changing relative interval lengths and associated scales), although there won't normally be much use for that.

just a wishlist item.  see, now, if the perfmon mmc snap-in was open source, i could get to work ;-)

hmm - or maybe extend this adaptive orientation to not only “recent” data, but a “magnifier” effect that can be applied wherever it's needed within the dataset.  locked at the right end, it's what i described above.  at the left, it's (similar to) the standard log scale.

of course, all of this requires the time scale to be handled as duration (since dataset start) rather than absolute time, but the display can still indicate times.

in any case, this is a better representation of how we view events - more detail close in, decreasing with distance.  kinda like viewing a fractal (that's a hint, and so was that, but not these last two statements ;-) ).

related thoughts:

• how can this be applied to function range and not just domain ?
• the discrete interval approach is a like our number system.
• think adaptive scaling and local magnification in terms of gravitation and cosmological phenomena such as expansion. (no, i don't spcifically know what i'm talking about; probably being stupid here.)

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when the second amendment was written, there was not a large gap between the arms owned by the average frontiersman and those owned the military elite. 

something bothers me about using the phrase “nuclear proliferation” to apply to non-nation entities.  seems to me you're banned until you're a member of the club.  with precedents like that, the situation in dprk and iran is understandable.  we'll beat you down until you've got 'em, then welcome you when you do.  (of course, there's the phenomenal counter-example of south africa.)

do you think this nation's founders would support an ideology that allowed _all_ persons and organizations whatever firepower they can amass ?   to be logically and historically consistent, it seems we must continue that today.  or have things changed ?

for the last hundred years or so, there has been a huge imbalance between private and governmental forces.  the argument for such a situation might be something along the lines that today's technological achievements and their impact on global physical and economical force were not foreseen two hundred years ago, and that we are in a fundamentally different position.

but are we ?  now more than ever in history, established powers are so entrenched over the general population that even the thought of armed rebellion is unthinkable.  well, it is for us well-trained westerners, at least.  especially when we have been so well disempowered. 

perhaps there should be more of a balance of power between the governed and the governing.  what else have we unthinkingly bowed to ?

holes all over the place here, but something to think about.  nukes (and other wmd) for the masses ?  vernor vinge contemplated just such a world in his stories twenty years ago.

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sourceforge.net: good idea, eh ?  all that open-source, free information goodness - ahh, what a breath of fresh air in this increasingly locked-down digital world.

i don't know where i got that idea.  my fault, of course, because the world is never that simple, and support for these things has to come from somewhere, i guess.  so i had a small illusion, that got disillusioned:

• i guess they have to bow to the legal environment when the character of one project threatens support to the majority.  oh, well.

  “Approximately 10 days ago we received a lot of coverage regarding a DMCA request we received from Apple Computer regarding a product called Playfair, a project that removes encryption from Apple's AAC digital music format. The issue was extensively written-about by our sister Web site slashdot.org and other Apple Mac-related sites. The project is now offline. When the SF.NET team receives a DMCA request, we follow our policy, which is outlined here: http://tinyurl.com/396x7
  
  Typically, when we receive a DMCA request, the project at hand is removed for a minimum of 10 days. The project admin, however, has the ability to make a counter-claim, which can bring the project back online in short order. In the case of Playfair, the admin decided to not make a counter-claim, hence the project is still offline.”
  
  ---from the april sourceforge sitewide update mailing

• a premium sourceforge service ?  yep.  they say that it's just extras, that all the old service is still there, but i noticed that now some searching features are for paying customers only, in addition to notifications that you once were able to get for free.  kind of an orwellian rewrite of history.
• i noticed that they had advertising banners that were bypassing my ad blocking. my symantec stuff didn't recognize their ads.osdn.com domain.  also, they are using script to write the ad tags into the page as it loads, which doesn't give a chance for the ad blocker to work.  now, i don't mind the text ads so bad, but sucking up my bandwidth for large banners by using subversive tactics is kind of annoying.  at least the ads aren't offensive; mostly for stuff related to development.   and those google ads appearing everywhere ?  not sure how those are going to be blocked at all.
• seems sourceforge has a somewhat sophisticated advertising structure.  which makes sense, given their size.  for example, the google ads that appear are hosted in an iframe that references an osdn.com link, which is what they use to select and present the google ads, rather than embedding the ads directly on the page.  they kind of have to do it that way to manage the hundreds of thousands of pages they serve.  since that's not really in accordance with the google ad agreement, they must have made special arrangements.
• just who are these osdn.com folks, anyway ?  oh, ok - wow, they own slashdot.com,  as well as a lot of other sites i thought were fairly independent. silly me.  hmm, and they have a parent:
• vasoftware.com - nice.  commercialized versions of sourceforge software, with a big selling point being the facilitation of offshored projects.  now, i have some strange feeling, not well thought out, that this sort of thing, while perhaps better for the global economy as a whole (and that is still a controversial conclusion in its own right), is not good at all for the profession of software engineering.  hell, it will never even be able to acheive that status at this rate.  and it should.  actually, what probably _will_ happen is that this field will sort itself out into “laborers” and “engineers” (and architects, etc.) in a way that will rationalize the field and the distribution and use of resources.  but until then, we're all in one big “commodity“ group.  which has historically led to unions, and all the attendant pros and cons.

where did i ever get the idea that “open source” meant “non-commercial” ?  but i still have this feeling of having been offered candy until i crave it, and then the dealer starts to charge.  “it's free, it's free, it's free - are you dependent yet ?  good - now, give me your money and any spare limbs, or else.”

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• particles have no bones - do they ?
• every act of creation is infinitely destructive of every other possibility, yet the alternative of attempting to preserve all potential through withholding of the creative act results in mere emptiness, the non-realization of all.

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just a reference to stuff on a tech blog i am sometimes trying to keep:

Tech Notes

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i caught a few episodes of this on late-night / early morning pbs over the past year, and then more recently i've tried to catch them all.  just another history telecourse, eh ?  not even close.  for me it was like mini-series quality, albeit of the documentary kind.  i just saw the last two episodes and was finally moved to see what was on the web.  i'm glad i did; i had no idea of the amount of content out there on the annenberg/cpb website. dang, and i always kind of ignored that as just another of those annoying credits on what seemed like half the pbs offerings out there. 

wrong.  they have (free!) live streaming broadcasts, video on demand for these series, syllabi, more.  great for educator and educatee alike.  but it's for broadband !  whine.  yeah, it's about time i updated that particular technology, this may be the final motivation.  but at least i can get the sound.

which brings me back to this particular series.  i found this one review, which, although i disagree with his conclusions, also points out why i find this series so fascinating: it does not speak down to its viewers. the nit in the review seems to want to reduce all “education” to formulaic vanilla.  thank god for those who pursue excellence in spite of their audiences' potential shortcomings.  but he also correctly picks up on (although did not have the breadth of vision to express) the fact that this show is not so much educational as it is intellectual entertainment.  there is a difference, and there is value in pointing this out.

so now i'm going back and picking up on the episodes i missed out on.  even just the sound track is worth it. interesting lecturer.  he just doesn't spout fodder from undergraduate texts, he (eugen weber) expresses his opinion as a historian as well.  it's just too bad we can't get his perspective on the last 15 years: the show was made in 1989.  damn.

and then i'm going to see what other goodies await on that site.  and free. it's nice to see some significant multimedia content out there that doesn't have to involve some nominal criminal activity.

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i saw you there, i saw you then
the saddest words - what might have been

The Case For Orion

with reference to earlier post: lost in space

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i was playing with some tv related stuff recently, pulling down schedule data as xml from zap2it labs, then creating a little page for myself that tracks my place in the tv schedule. then i thought, “hey, i have an ir port on this laptop. and there's another one on the tv!”.

hours later i pull my head out of my nether regions. looked all over the web for software projects, specs, drivers, what have you (i wanted to do this with existing hardware), and guess what ? oh, did the post title give it away ?

for some reason, the full windows os doesn't provide a means to access the built in ir port in the necessary mode. now, this works on the pda os's - palm, ce, etc. kind of a head scratcher there. and no one has coded a driver that bypasses the irda stack completely. perhaps something can be stolen from ce and hacked into xp...

seems the same shortcoming exists with linux. now, the additional hardware it takes to do this pc-as-tv-remote thing can be very cheap and simple to build or buy, but why can't i use what i already have ?

as craig pointed out, “why do you want to use a sledgehammer to kill a flea ?” (well, not in so many words). easy - it's the principal of the thing.

actually, it's certainly doable, but would turn out to be a much more involved project than i want.  maybe.

should i provide links to some of the resources i found ? considering that there isn't any destination to reach, the only fun left is in the trip, and i don't want to deprive anyone of the fun of hunting all that stuff down. but here's some hints: lirc, ircomm, irda.

and, just for fun, look up “ipronto”. and head to www.remotecentral.com for saner options.

look here for a different take on a tv project: PVRs, DVD Burners and little pcs, oh my!

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says craig: Iraq and shades of the past -- Somolia / Lebanon / Vietnam

getting it right in the last paragraph.  everyone's been making comparisons with vietnam again, and that's not it at all.  the us in iraq situation is more like the ussr in afghanistan.

i have no problem with bold moves, as long as they are carried out with commitment.  this bush-absenteeism thing is strange.  good thing he's getting on tv tonight; long overdue.

but the biggest error is apparently being uncovered as the micro-management by the dod civilian leadership, aka rumsfeld's gang.  if you're going to have a war, say so, then step back and let the generals do their jobs.  if you don't like what they come up with, it's not that they're wrong - it's a sign that the initial decision needs to be rethought - _before_ committing.  once you're in, finish. (gee, that sounds familiar... ;-) )

as for hanging around vs. leaving in defeat, i don't think it's an either-or choice.  i'm all for time-boxed wars, to borrow a project management concept: commit to a specific period to accomplish your objectives, and a drop-dead date (no pun intended).  you're done when the clock runs out.  make sure everyone knows ahead of time that that's what you plan to do, so that you can march smartly in, wreak havoc and trample everything thoroughly, then just as smartly march back out.  tell the iraqis, “look, we're only going to be here x months, and then we're gone. you can either fuck around playing with guns, or get you can get your shit together.  it's _your_ future, get used to it.”

i mean really, since when is a policeman a marriage counselor ?  yeah, i guess that _does_ happen, doesn't it ?

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