April 2005 - Posts
the supply chain is complete. now
papa john's takes credit cards online !
vague thought: if you could manage ftl travel / signals, and you attempted an act resulting in a causality paradox (eg, shooting your own grandfather), then maybe something different happens than the usual crop of conclusions (which pretty much fall into two camps: the act is prevented, or reality bifurcates).
i'm thinking it would look something like quantum superposition on a macroscopic scale for all spacetime in the affected region.
region ? what do its boundaries look like ? some sort of topological continuity so that the indeterminacy smoothly drops off, or an event horizon ? what would the properties of such a region be ? what would it “look” like ?
flipped around, quantum mechanical uncertainty at the usual scales might be interpreted as exactly this issue with causality. which gets me thinking about the relationship between qm and relativity. i don't know qed (1, 2; there's probably an actual course online - right ?), which is the next physics to consider.
then for the the hell of it, how might these concepts speak to the problems of quantum gravity ? causality, entropy, blackholes, event horizons ...
wishy-washy thoughts. been reading the “relativity and ftl travel faq”. yeah, i know; i never actually said this was science anywhere, did i ? ;-) but you never know what of value might pop up when bouncing around a bunch of speculations, if nothing else, then as possible mechanisms in works of fiction.
hee hee - ok, if you buy into “indeterminacy” as inextricably linked with things like free choice, consciousness, and the things that make us human (the “soul”), which is one mystical view of the universe, then try this on for size: perhaps the universe was an unconscious mechanical reality - until someone eventually did come up with ftl, time travel or some other technology with the potential to cause violations of causality. it was their attempt to change history at some time in the past - oh, let's make it the 6000 or so years ago that the creationists seem so fond of - that created this bubble of indeterminate reality in which we now exist. a macroscopic quantum spacetime soliton, so to speak (well, maybe standing wave; a soliton needs something to travel in - ?). it is self sustaining, as it was created by one of its products. that event - occurring some unknown distance in the future (and connected to the creation in the past) - could be known as the god event, the moment of creation of the conscious universe (the physical one has existed all along).
is this region expanding ? and how in hell could it start (“start” ?) in the first place ?
all right, that's enough nonsense for now ;-)
be honest now - have you ever been a bit chilly, so sat with your computer on your lap just to get warm ? wonderful, isn't it ? all that science and technology and business and manufacturing and global supply chain - all for a high-tech electric throw-blanket.
- what's a good way of printing a weblog ? a post per page, with the hyperlinks footnoted to expose the url's ? fine. then how do you do that ? more of a pita than it should be.
- good idea for resumes: well, not a resume, per se, i guess. but you know how they do case histories for various projects or other undertakings ? yeah, like that, for each engagement. ok, maybe that applies more to the consulting biz than other ways of dong business. gets kinda long too.
- i need a hedge trimmer for my lawn. heyyy.... but really, it's so dang healthy this year. if i could set my lawn mower at eight inches, it'd be great. oh, shut up, and mind the context ;-)
- hey, the jag series finale was just right. big smile. very cool. sad to see 'em go. the final scene made some connections with past cast. all very smarmy, and well done.
- so the bank i use up in michigan bought out a chain with a local presence. i thought, cool, i can consolidate all my accounts, etc. they've been ok, and after twenty years, i figure that's a good thing. especially after the crap i got from a local bank earlier this year. nuh-uh. they can't touch my accounts there. wtf ? maybe it's just transition pains. but they claim it's interstate banking rules. oh, well. i still will use this institution, but it looks like i'll have to open local accounts. i'll keep my original one though. meanwhile, no one there really knew what to do with me. and the poor lady who tried to help had a cold. i felt bad for her, but then she should have stayed home. i don't altogether buy the interstate barrier thing. what about internet stuff ? so i'll call michigan monday. oh yeah - to deposit a check, i had to go use the atm outside. wow.
- my phone died. i think it's the battery. and my 'puter died momentarily. some driver problem that started with the last “patch”. nothing wants to work around here. not even me ;-)
- so i reboot 'puter. (phone is on an electron i.v.) all my web site specific settings are gone ! ick - 'puter lost its cookies ! kinda makes me wanna lose mine. for some reason, it's putting cookies and all temp internet files in the wrong place. multiple wrong places. i reboot again. everything's fixed. i don't even wanna know...
Red Rectangle Nebula
“The Red Rectangle Nebula is one of the most unusual celestial bodies in the galaxy. This detail from the Hubble image shows the twin stars at the nebula's core ejecting conelike streams of gas and dust outward in opposing directions, producing a distinctive rung-like pattern. Astronomers know of no other nebula like it in the universe.” (HO, NASA / AP)
reminds me of star trek and other scifi where they are all hot to investigate unusual structures. which gives me an idea: wouldn't we be best served in our search for "aliens" by focusing on such regions for just such reasons1 ? assuming beings actually travel there, and that would seem improbable. besides, these sorts of regions aren't exactly safe.
similarly, maybe if we create a ruckus locally, someone would pay attention to us. however, it will be quite a while before we are capable of sending up an extragalactic flare.
what about others doing this ? any such "billboards" are probably going to look like the results of natural processes to us.
heeyyyy...
1 in the
time travel sub-genre, this is known as “the jesus effect”
[or so i thought; i can't seem to find a reference], sort of related to the
fermi paradox: if there were time travel in humanity's future, wouldn't crowds of travelers appear at major historical events ? of course, this assumes that what
we consider “major” remains so, the implication being that the travel will have been achieved in a future we would consider meaningful. some authors have worked out some sort of barriers that time traveling folks can't penetrate before. in at least
one story this is expressed in the form of time travel needing a receiver, the first development of which results in its own peculiar circumstances.
so how come you can't get bbc on cable ? i think they'd make a killing here. which probably means that the us cable operators probably have some regulations that they have lobbied to have in place to prevent just such a thing.
for that matter, why can't we sign up for arbitrary feeds from around the world ? and you can't just point a dish, since some of the satellites used are below our horizon. i wonder what the us would be like with a truly global diet of input. and no, the web isn't it. we are in the habit of partitioning that information from our perceptions of our own culture. it's much different with the traditional mass media.
growing up in detroit we always had canadian broadcast tv and radio as an option. it really helped in some events to see a different perspective. in contrast the continental heartland of america is myopic and bigoted. zieg heil for the faderland !
just a taste...
Conservative Christians See Victory in Battle of Culture Wars With Ascent of Pope Benedict XVI
By RICHARD N. OSTLING
The Associated Press
Apr 23, 2005 — Now that Americans have had a few days to absorb the election of Pope Benedict XVI, it's clear that conservative Christians whether Roman Catholic or not feel they've won another battle in the nation's culture wars. Liberals seem to ready to concede the point, but they aren't happy about it. [more..]
how do i explain this ? this is exactly the same flag as when bush, with 51% of the vote, claimed a “mandate”, and liberals were reported as throwing in the towel, and shifting their own attitudes farther left right (i meant right, dammit! crap. - 2005.05.01) while bowing to the “inevitable” victory of conservatives:
- mandate ? no, hardly.
- was the report on liberal attitudes accurate, or was it conservative propaganda ?
- is there any reason for liberals to throw in the towel ? no.
- should they ? no. the result would be a severe imbalance in in many parts of society, global and national.
as for religious conservatism, i am all for maintaining their traditions. but that is no signal to the rest of society (even if these interpretations of events were tenable, which they aren't). i do, however, recognize that many will treat it as such, regardless of the illogic involved. thus, the flag.
besides, as i've described before, religious conservatism and the republican/political conservative agendas are not identical; in fact, they differ widely. but the confusion of these is widespread.
and the suckers - liberals and religious both - buy this message, unable to distinguish the two and buying into the political fallacies. this is the same tragic mistake that has ravaged history until recent times.
to be balanced, i should defend the political conservatives as well. but their agenda seems very much to be “shove our beliefs down everyone's throats”. since when is that defensible ? this species of “conservatism” is in reality tyranny. respectable conservatives should be outraged (that's why i try and isolate the abusive group under the label “neocon”, so as not to sully the others). whatever happened to freedoms ? that isn't liberalism, libertarianism, or even conservatism - it's americanism. and more than that, it's democracy.
hopefully, leveler heads will prevail.
SNOW !!
AH-ha-hahahahahaa !
[sorry for the ej reference there ;-)]
ok, i think it's finally begun to sink in: remote scripting, scriptlets, behaviors, script components, windows scripting host, even the vsa interface, all seem to be dead and dying technologies. of course, some of those have very clearly been dead for years, subsumed into other technologies, or at least renamed. primarily, however, they fall into two categories: script components, and script hosting. script components have been implemented in evolving ways over the years, pretty much ending up encapsulated in dhtml behaviors in their latest incarnation. their wider use has been severely handicapped by the lack of any but the default handful of interface handlers, and the reason for that is that documentation was never released on how to write those.
as for hosting environments, wsh 5.6 was the latest release from microsoft, and only supported pre-.net technologies. at the time people were gushing over what we would find in the next version: .net support, and all that that implies. and there was also a lot of excitement in the scripting community over vsa, which was a much more robust way of exposing an applications innards for extension by end-users using scripting. other common script “hosts” were ie, and asp, and sometimes ms office.
well, none of this came to pass. in fact, the excitement continued until it just suddenly vanished from the windows landscape. a few primitive .net script-like hosting applications have been produced by the open source community, and at least one proprietary one, but they don't really compare to the type of script hosts one might expect from the originator of the technology, microsoft. i can imagine the faces of all these enthusiastic script people at ms, being told their baby was dead.
and this seems to have happened sometime in 2001 (the decision seems to have been made earlier; one can infer from the articles of the preceding year that support had already been yanked). nothing has happened since then in the script world.
i've seen a few speculations here and there that it may have been for corporate marketing reasons. who knows. i just think it sucks.
i really like scripting: its portability, its speed of development cycle, it transparency. i think that applies to the many folks who did asp too, even if they didn't explicitly think of it that way. now, aspx code-behind-page/forms is fine - but that should be left at a script-level as well, with compilation optional.
perhaps this is all related to com disappearing from the landscape as well. regardless of implementation, however, the functionality represented by com is still required. and this is only peripherally related to scripting.
and so we will have avalon and indigo and winfs (winfx?) - whenever longhorn shows up. what will be the scripting support analog at that point ? because for now, all these system admins and other IT type folk have relied on scripts and batch files and other command line tools to take care of their jobs for - well, since the beginning. and many of the administrative interfaces in the windows universe are not exposed through gui's. so they are left with an adequate but aging utility technology, one that is being left in the dust. leaving a good chunk of operations out of the .net world of benefits seems silly. or is that one of the motivations ?
depends on microsoft's vision, i suppose. the real vision, not the babble they sell us.
so perhaps it's time to let scripting go, for a while anyway, and open up the compilers and ide's once again. talk about being chained. talk about proprietary interfaces. soon we'll be “compiling” xml, xslt, soap and so on. and the cycle will begin again.
“mommy, what's that ?”
“why, that's script, honey.”
“what's script ?”
“well, once upon a time, anyone who wanted could program a computer.”
“ 'program' ?”
“yes, child. they say that's what the wizards now do, in their towers with their expensive machines.”
“can i program, mommy ?”
“shh, you might be overheard.”
... i finished the majority of the categorization of prior posts. go figure. had an interesting time dredging up old memories of ms access programming. just the old ins & outs that you get with experience that lets a person do a lot with the available interfaces with no programming at all. anyway, i offloaded the blog data into an mdb, created all the categorization records here, the appended them back to the database. no bumps, burps or sniffles, all went smooth. just like old times ;-)
of course, the ten categories i ended up with have a lot of overlap and fuzzy edges, so almost all of them contain a large number of posts. but when browsing the list in each category, it's clear that major threads of thought were captured. kinda cool, in a way. it looks like a few things may have been missed in some categories, but every post now shows up in at least one group. this should make digging through archives much easier.
odd that categories don't show up when viewing individual posts, like they do on many (most?) other blog engines. another shortcomings of the “skins” - because they really aren't. also, the database is a bit screwy in places, improperly normalized, unused tables, that sort of thing. but it's small and thus easy to figure out.
as a side note, i also found it's very easy to grab a copy of the blog database this way. i was looking for a simple way to mirror it, and the sql import/export tool would do just fine. i could even automate within the db itself, if appropriate firewall holes could be opened without exposing security flaws. but that would probably best be done over a vpn connection or something else encrypted.
MIT prank paper accepted for publication
Thursday, April 21, 2005 Posted: 9:40 AM EDT (1340 GMT)
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- Three MIT graduate students set out to show what kind of gobbledygook can pass muster at an academic conference these days, writing a computer program that generates fake, nonsensical papers. And sure enough, a Florida conference took the bait. [more...]
good stuff. but the focus seems only to be on the inadequacy of the conferences, etc. however, it also implicitly points up the problem with the producers of papers as well: so much of it is indistinguishable from crap, because of multiple factors, including lack of content quality or originality, content obscurity, poor style or writing, and huge overall volume of information (reviewers being swamped in a reverse-snr effect, unable to pick out the outliers, in addition to the usual swamping of high-value papers).
i've seen this sort of thing before, various generators, i mean. it hadn't occurred to me to attempt to submit anything from them. come to think of it, such procedures should be instituted for all journals, conferences and any other forum where reliability of content is an issue. it would provide a type of control as to the robustness of adjudication processes. such tests should include not only the generated stuff, but cases covering all possible combinations of errors in reviewing. it's sort of like having people testing the security at airports.
hmm - since many preprint archives are completely unreviewed, it should be possible to flood them with pseudo-science spam. yuk, but perhaps a necessary step.
in fact, it may turn out that much of what is churned out in today's publish-or-perish world of academia would actually fail such tests. through this forced artificial criteria for tenure competition and what have you, low quality/content work is encouraged over more valuable criteria. perhaps using automated tools along these lines would negate these practices and loosen up the intellectual gridlock now in place.
there have recently been tools in the news that have traced spam and the evolution in content of specific instances (chain letters in particular), and also teachers using automated tools to detect plagiarism. adding the above mechanisms, and other concepts, to this toolbox can only help.
but oh, how the university system would scream. change is never easy for anyone.
thought: what about such testing for our court systems as well ?
related posts - i'll take this opportunity to bring together references on information etc. scattered throughout this weblog:
- danger, will robinson ! - information reliability
- the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth - up to a limit - the effects of privacy
- [this title is not important] - truth ?
- as pogo said... - speech as a right vs. privilege
- i know that you know that i know that ... - limits to knowledge
- don't you love a good conspiracy theory ? - on propaganda
- q & a - the unreasonable persistence of state (see comments)
- solaris - communications on the edge
- alt mbti ? - analyzing personality and pseudo-math
- discernment - misinformation and manipulation
- wikinews ? - modes of communication
- cross link - censorship
- using global intelligence to provide global intelligence - inputs from the webmind
- some thinking about thinking - religion as viral meme
- fuck you - more censorship
- brief visit with an old passion - perspectives
- thoughts on thought - conformity in science
- quick, look over here - again perception, and conformity
- meta-musings: on communication - shifting channels
- not a new idea... - perceptions (again)
- run that by me again ? - a ramble towards reality
- the state of scifi - perception (again)
- the age of metaknowledge - abstraction
- feng shui for the mind - the state of education
- the "information poor" get a boost - access
clearly this needs another category. what should it be called ? and i noticed a space related category for a number of other posts as well. maybe now that i'm at the 300 post threshhold i should look at categorizations again. to actually apply them i wshould use another interface altogether. probably ms access ;-)
update - ok, here's the categories:
- i.c.k. - “information, communication and knowledge”
- e.t. - “(extra)terrestrial”
that last one still needs to be appplied to previous posts. see the category pages for a little more explanation. sorting all this crap out is a long term effort, but this should capture a good chunk of the material so far - once i go back and apply them, anyway. there's also room for a category for things with a vague resemblance to “humor”, and another that is “dear diary” stuff. and ... ?
so how do you turn down cute little girls coming to the door to collect for a charity run ? i mean, without discouraging them. or maybe they should be discouraged ? i dunno. well, i turned her down anyway. i felt like such an ogre.
probably looked like one too. today is one of those haven't-showered-or-shaved-in-several-days days. and i can't just pretend i'm not here when i'm sitting here in the front room with the tv on and the windows open, sneezing and belching.
unusual day. the gas lady wandered across the lawn. the landlord stopped by with an apprasier. apparently he left messages on the land-line, the one i rarely check because the telemarketers own it. i ceded that territory long ago (so why don't they pay the bills ?). people were cutting the grass next door. kids were playing in the yard in back. and then the little girl (she looked like she was no more than eight; you'd think a parent was hanging around somewhere, given today's paranoia). it never gets that busy around here.
and all the while here i am in my shorts and undershirt and unshaven smelliness. yuk. expectations of presentability in this society ? i guess there is such a thing - and, of course, i am at odds with it.
ah well, things are as they are. i spent a good chunk of the afternoon browsing wikipedia on tensors, gauge theories, quantum gravity, and some one or two step removed items.
ok, maybe three.
now how hard would it be to have a browser that encounters a “broken” link try to find it at the wayback machine ? sounds like a good idea for a bho to me, with a toolbar switch to toggle this behavior. perhaps this would help counter some of the web's advancing senility. or at least its long term memory problems. why not pull things from the attic when they've been removed from the front room ?
i wonder how this applies to various government efforts since the wtc incident to purge the web of “sensitive” information ? do we need an offshore archive ? a swiss bank account (or cayman) for data ?
maybe this post's title should be “politically incorrect browsers”.
anyway, this just came up because i was remembering the case of my camp dearborn post last summer, and how their web site was in the process of being gutted, leaving me with missing images and dead links (or dead images and missing links). i went ahead and updated the post, for completeness' sake.
a related issue is information access being changed. it's missing in a different sense. what to do with stuff that once was free and now is premium ? i'm sure some of that is archived as well. what about stuff that was always premium ? and what about other blockages and rerouting ?
somewhat related, i was kind of revisiting that old history thingy of mine. seems i could use one approach, create a bho that stores my browsing behavior in my own format, in addition to the standard browser history behavior. in fact, here's one already created - in c#, yet. too bad it wasn't configurable, i would just use it as is. now, i could create my own publishing mechanism. but i was thinking, since the whole point was to share anyway, why not dump it all off to an existing link share system ? the implicit intent there is that people would be somewhat selective about what links they save, but that's already pretty subjective. value judgement ? so for me the selection criteria is not entirely indiscriminate, it would be “whatever links i found worthwhile to follow for any reason”. of course, i would want to warn the few people aggregating my stuff that i was going to do that.
More Posts
Next page »