Gumptionology

Googlewhack Minus One, Incremented.

2012-01-23T12:56:00.001-08:00

A good friend of mine just found that Google could not find any match in the entire Intertubes for

excelsior etymology

Well! We know what to do about that, don't we? While he continues to look for the actual etymology of the word "excelsior", we might as well play a little at the SEO game. Excelsior!

Nort

PS: Been a long time. Let's see what happens with this blog, shall we?

Cooking, health and cognitive therapy for both

2008-12-17T23:04:00.001-08:00

For now: This is a quickie "fieldstone" for a general Quality / gumption matter. Food can be very uninspiring if you let it be. And when you eat easy-to-find prepared food products what you see when you look in the mirror can be a real gumption drain too.

A lot of people, many of them guys, grew up without really getting cooking. A lot of non-guys might have, too, I can't speak with authority about that.

There's a Zappa song called The Dangerous Kitchen [lyrics here] which sort of sums up some of the concerns (warning: lyrics are not entirely polite). Frank himself is reported to have generally limited his own cooking to jabbing a fork into a hot dog right out of the 'fridge and then cooking it over a stovetop gas burner until it blackened -- the eponymous Burnt Weenie Sandwich.

Bob Scher wrote a nifty little book (out of print, dammit) called The Fear of Cooking, which I dearly love [short review here].

Comes now further news of a website called Cooking for Engineers -- well, actually, I'd heard about it a while ago.

The point of all that is that a lot of people are developmentally limited when it comes to cooking. And by the time they're adult it can be really easy to either lose gumption entirely or lose zest and just fuel the meat machine mechanically--and either way, wind up eating fast food and high-calorie low-quality foods like peanut butter straight off a spoon.

We can do better than that. I'm living proof. Or I hope to be, soon. :)

The last time I was close to "fightin' weight", I was so broke I managed to be on a sort of caloric restriction. Well, now I've got a high-quality pedometer -- a Yamax DIGI-WALKER SW200, thank you very much, with a precision pendulum movement, not the cheapass $12 clicky-ball P.o.S. from Big 5 -- and I'm deliberately parking at the wrong end of parking lots so I can put in at least one extra mile of walking, every day. But I still have the tendency to procrastinate and loll in bed until I have to rush to work, and then I can't do some of the walking-- no time!

My personal goal is to fill my mornings with morsels: low-glycemic-index, tiny wonderful tasting treats (there is a ginger mango CHEESE out there in the world; can you IMAGINE such a thing?); and use that as leverage to (a) get my ass out of bed with a spring in my step and (b) get me more concerned with the experience of gustatory Quality and less with stuffing my maw until the mass-market container of Food Court / Franchise {x} Bad Food is empty.

There's a wonderful story I want to relate about M. F. K. Fisher (it concerns her father, too), but that will have to wait.

I bet I lose weight and have fun too. Let's see if I'm right.

QOTD: freedom

2008-10-15T00:26:00.000-07:00

freedom

My two dogs
tied to a tree
by a ten-foot leash
kept whining and howling for an hour
till I let them off.

Now they are lying quietly on the grass
a few feet further from the tree
and they haven't moved since I let them go.

Freedom may be
only an idea
but it's a matter of principle
even to a dog.

-- Louis Dudek

Amen, brother, amen.

Worthy of the Presidency

2008-10-08T22:27:00.000-07:00

This Guy.

At the moment this video doesn't require registration to view. It's 26 minutes long. Make popcorn.

I'd vote for this guy over either of the major candidates in a New York nanosecond. He's got the Palin "outsider" thing and blackness and all sorts of stuff going for him.

Plus, I don't think he'd want the job. That's a winning element right there, along the Cincinnatus / Buckley "phone book" line (The number's up to 635 now, from 400, but you get the drift).

And I know he'd drop dead before appearing with a pre-Presidential seal on his podium.

Bat bloodstreams blown-out by blades?

2008-09-14T16:14:00.000-07:00

OK, this is truly sad/strange. Calgary researcher seem to have found that an inordinate seeming number of bats are being killed by wind turbines not from outright collisions but due to the pressure drop near the lifting surfaces damaging the capillaries in their little batty lungs...

Sigh. Ain't nothin' simple.

A love not offered lightly

2008-09-05T00:37:00.000-07:00

Please go to, read and sign this petition.

If you don't know of Rick Rescorla yet, you'll feel like a better person once you do.

QOTD: In Tenebris

2008-09-02T17:45:00.000-07:00

I recall that people have been asking me to tell more about myself. Herewith, the motto of my house, as rendered by me with some assistance from an unnamed classicist: In tenebris omnia vexilli glaucus sunt. In serviceable English: In the dark all flags are gray.

Footnotes:
Latin doesn't actually have one word that means exactly "gray". "Glaucus" also means cloudy. "In tenebris" can also be translated as "in doubt".

Sometimes it gets to me

2008-09-02T12:18:00.000-07:00

[Original draft date: 2008.06.20, approximately]
Yes, long time no blog. Today I want to talk briefly about innumeracy and incompetence. Two examples follow.

1. Recently on Winds of Change a visitor reactivated an old thread to tell the readers it's implausible (/impossible) a plane with an over-100-foot wingspan could only make a roughly round hole less than 20 feet in diameter in the Pentagon. I'm afraid we following posters were not kind to that person.

2. Lately, someone I know who sells electronic parts and tools has been being deluged with customers who want to build "hydrogen generators" for their cars, to "double their gas mileage". These people are not, it appears, able to respond numerately to my exploration: if they could double their gas mileage, it would probably mean that they are (at present efficiency) blowing enough hydrocarbons out their tailpipe to blind the drivers behind them: assuming 20 mpg, taking 3800 cc/gal, that's a specific fuel consumption of 190 cc per mile. Half that is about three fluid ounces of unburned fuel out the tailpipe every mile. Hmm. I don't think that's anywhere near the numbers I get when they smog my car, either standing still or on the dyno. I wonder why?

Yes, I know there are probably all sorts of "analyses" available for why that approach is wrong-headed, some even involving *gasp* math stuff -- work diagrams and stuff about how vigorously steam expands. But my point is that these guys who come in to the store are just Pumpkin-Eaters, as far as he or I can tell. They Want To Believe.

Folks, I don't have the time to grab each one of you and tell you "No. No, that's not happening." And you don't even want to hear it. What you want is to build your hydrogen generator, or spout your conspiracy theory, because that way it feels like you're not just some sort of passive spectator.

I understand the urge. It is being misdirected.

What's wrong with this picture?

2008-09-02T10:26:00.000-07:00

Behold, I bring you The Immaculate Sol. Spotless, just the way the Holy Roman Church and countless scholastic authorities envisioned it before that pesky Galileo got up to his naughty antics with optics and revealed that usually, the sun has acne.

NOAA has changed their minds about whether our sun had 0 spots or one really tiny little zit when this picture was taken. Either way, we are at a stark solar minimum.

Why does this matter? Quoting from the Daily Tech:

Solar physicist Ilya Usoskin of the University of Oulu, Finland, tells DailyTech the correlation between cosmic rays and terrestrial cloud cover is more complex than "more rays equals more clouds". Usoskin, who notes the sun has been more active since 1940 than at any point in the past 11 centuries, says the effects are most important at certain latitudes and altitudes which control climate. He says the relationship needs more study before we can understand it fully.

See, solar activity affects the solar magnetosphere which affects the Earth's magnetosphere which changes how many and powerful are the cosmic rays that get through. Which might change the nucleation of clouds, which would change cloud cover, which would change net insolation at the ground and in the troposphere. Got all that?

More from the Daily Tech:

Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins.

But this year -- which corresponds to the start of Solar Cycle 24 -- has been extraordinarily long and quiet, with the first seven months averaging a sunspot number of only 3. August followed with none at all. The astonishing rapid drop of the past year has defied predictions, and caught nearly all astronomers by surprise.

In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion.

The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial.

I bet they did. See, protracted solar somnolence is correlated with Ice Ages (see: Maunder Minimum), and we all know that fad died out with Peter Gabriel's fan base, right? (His "Here Comes the Flood" was inspired by the idea that an ice age was upon us, with a side order of Nuclear Winter. I like the song, as a meditation on folly and fate... but.)

Zany madcap environmentalismist hijinks will doubtless ensue.

Phlat: the new phat?

2008-09-01T23:56:00.000-07:00

1) Constant Readers will recall I wrote a post a while ago about the imminent death knell for the incandescent lamp. Another hurdle seems to have been crossed: LEDs are starting to become practical for use as rear-projection light sources to replace halogens. I give you the Luminus Technologies Phlatlight. "Phlat" is not just 'hood-speak, it's a contraction of "Photon Lattice". Wizzy tech/consumer article here.

2) Another thing with "flatness" in its name: There's an open-online-content textbook company starting up. Flat World Knowledge LLC. They hope to sell hard copies at a profit. Me, I want the fast feedback for corrigenda that this sort of thing could, and morally ought to, provide. Man, I hate spending $70 on a textbook and then finding out the author can't be bothered to publish fixes. Such as a certain de Anza College professor who wrote one of the the most popular college-course networking fundamentals texts extant. Ahem.

3) Then there's the new info about the Antikythera Machine, most of the works of which were probably cut from a single sheet of metal 2 mm thick. Permit me to direct you to this Winds of Change post where you'll find links in the original entry and in the follow-on comments. Show Joe Katzman some love, why don't you?

ZOMG ROFLMAOTSETUNG

2008-08-31T03:56:00.000-07:00

Not merely a hat tip, but a grand flourishy Musketeer-type courtly doff of my hat, whilst making a long leg, to Wretchard at the recently-relocated Belmont Club.

At bottom of the linked post, he points to a (now ~~not~~ readable at no monetary cost by mere humans who are willing to submit to a registration gauntlet) NYTimes article. Below is my excerpt of his setup and a sweet secant thereof. ~~I can only wish I could~~ ~~I encourage interested parties to RTWT.~~ [Later: a pity it doesn't stay that delicious all the way through; it devolves into an Iowahawkesque send-up of Obama, which weakens the nonpartisan aspect both Wretchard and I draw from the excerpts we chose to post]

David Brooks captured the pompous, yet unreal quality of modern political debate in a satiric, cutting, fictional convention speech. Brooks lampooned the phenomenon of words upstaging reality. Brooks imagined a statesman telling his rapt audience:

My fellow Americans, it is an honor to address the Democratic National Convention at this defining moment in history. We stand at a crossroads at a pivot point, near a fork in the road on the edge of a precipice in the midst of the most consequential election since last year’s “American Idol.”

One path before us leads to the past, and the extinction of the human race. The other path leads to the future, when we will all be dead. We must choose wisely.

We must close the book on the bleeding wounds of the old politics of division and sail our ship up a mountain of hope and plant our flag on the sunrise of a thousand tomorrows with an American promise that will never die! For this election isn’t about the past or the present, or even the pluperfect conditional. It’s about the future, and Barack Obama loves the future because that’s where all his accomplishments are.

Yes. This is truly the essence of modern political speechifying as she is spoke. It's not just the Dems who do this, of course. It's merely one strain of the common amphigory of every Senator Claghorn and Gov. Slingwell Slugwell on the stump. {Hooray for Slugwell!!!}

And thanks for Sarah Palin for maybe, just maybe, breaking that mold a bit.

[Edited after a kindly soul clued me in to the "free reg" option at the NYT. So I created a fake-data NYT login account named pissedoffuser with a password of pissed -- I wonder how long that one will work?

There's a point where Mr Brooks goes the Monty Python "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch one better:

As a child, I was abandoned by my parents and lived with a colony of ants. We didn’t have much in the way of material possession, but we did have each other and the ability to carry far more than our own body weights. When I was young, I was temporarily paralyzed in a horrible anteater accident, but I never gave up my dream: the dream of speaking at a national political convention so my speech could be talked over by Wolf Blitzer and a gang of pundits.

Yeah, that's the real deal. That's Quality there.]

Hiatus? What Hiatus?

2008-08-24T15:16:00.001-07:00

Here's a link to a beautiful quick demonstration of inattentional blindness.

Richard Wiseman's AMAZING COLOR CHANGING CARD TRICK (via Youtube).

I will avoid putting spoilers here, but I do think it worth commenting on. Maybe soon.

Hat tip to Jeff Fry via the AST's AST UPDATE pdf zine.

The next time you are facing a gumption trap in your life, I hope you can find a way to consider, in a more relaxed and constructive way: Hmmm. What is it I'm not paying attention to?

Popularity Contest

2007-12-25T21:34:00.000-08:00

effect

apathetic

affect

integrity

metaphor

google

pretentious

awkward

eclectic

ambiguous

conundrum

whether

quixotic

albeit

melancholy

love

democracy

paradigm

didactic

hypocrite

These are a few of my favorite things. (Not -- many are often used in a hackneyed fashion. Still, it pays to increase your word power, and this list was based on queries, not use on the Web.)

"Meanwhile, slipping off the list were hypothesis, caveat, and gorgeous. Caveat only slipped to No. 23, so we're sure we haven't seen the last of this one."

Sort of a caveat caveat, eh?

Link.

Thanksgiving 2007: be glad you're not in the hospital

2007-11-22T21:38:00.000-08:00

I've got several things to blog about, after a long hiatus. First things first, though.

If you're one of the people who check in here hoping to see new stuff, or wondering wth is up, look forward to stuff in the near future; I am budgeting time every week to work on posts starting tomorrow.

As far as wth is up... I'm alive and feeling fine, though I had a moderately severe fall recently and am right now going through "max Q"... The pain after a spill seems to peak at around 48 hours post trauma and it appears to be right on schedule.

Random observation: celebrity proggies Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace Quaid apparently recently fell subject to a classic hospital goof: somebody figured a dosage wrong and gave them milli (1o^-3) instead of micro (10^-6) amounts -- of Heparin. Not good, as it's a potent anticoagulant.

Wild-*ssed thought: This just might actually be one of the few sensible reasons to use an English-style system for doses rather than metric. Slipped decimal points, and in particular milli vs micro errors, aka three orders of magnitude, happen in hospitals a lot more often than they should, often when there is time pressure, such as in neonatal units and emergency departments.

Problem with that is that there is no extant system of quirky drams and gills and fathoms for quantities that small. Bummer.

Notes that Clay Shirky probably already wrote better

2007-07-13T04:43:00.000-07:00

==Update: Welcome, Winds of Change readers!==
Check comment #1 on this thread, then pop back up here for the details of my category scheme. Thanks for visiting. Let's be civil, shall we?

In the cheery nonsequitur of an R. Crumb doodle: "Hi.... Let's get going!"

I want to get this out for review by my seven loyal readers even in rough form. I am probably building a square sandstone prototype of a Michelin racing radial that's already out there somewhere. Let me know if that's so.

I've been ruminating about some curious cultural concerns inspired by my stint "tending bar" (unpaid, it's a labor of love) over at Winds of Change.

Proposed: there are four kinds of online entities/personae, viz.:

Open
True Name used; or Nym (pseudonym/cognomen/nom de blog), if any, is [now] well known, or easily discoverable as one-to-one with True Name (barring hoaxes, ID theft).
Single-persona penalties and rewards. Deniability is circumscribed (modulo convincing evidence of impersonation/ID theft, etc.) Easily libeled / harassed / made afraid in some circumstances (e.g. Kathy Sierra kerfuffle, any number of other RL cases). Reputation and future data mining are up in the data cloud "forever" for all.
Seen as a "straight shooter" as long as there are no unpleasant surprises.
Iterated prisoner's dilemma is full strength or close to it.
Open entities might not make their backchannels readily available, but by Six Degrees mythos everybody has to have one, the trick is to know who/howto ask.

BAR STEREOTYPE (BS): The guy who comes into the bar and shows you his wallet full of kid pictures. You have his business card somewhere, so you know where he works.

Upstanding
Nym is a cognomen to a few insiders or none; is in place for reasons sufficient to the entity,
but there are mutltiple open channels of communication, and a stable ID/"Brand". Though True Name isn't common knowledge, some body of work is, and there is a working backchannel.
Deniability is still circumscribed; possibility of multiple, all Upstanding, Nyms for
different facets/roles across Web.
Potential for fewer penalties, fewer rewards.
ID/reputation of an Upstanding entity can still turn out to be built on sand.
Standard "what's he got to hide?" "You think you're cute with that fake name" etc. side-effects
In the long run, usage and pattern analysis will out; the True Name is vulnerable through an extension of the Deja News/Wayback Machine Effects.
Notion:
Upstanding-ness has degrees, but measure is not objective, it's contingent on
norms that "go without saying" for most people.
Conjecture:

relatively rich immersive environments such as Second Life, Worlds of Warcraft
can connect peers to trust/loyalty by activating neuro-anatomical wiring that is
unavailable to pure-text denizens of blogs/Facebook/Livejournal/etc.

Conjecture on prior conjecture:
what a crock!

BS: The guy you've played darts with in the bar for months--
but you only know his nickname. One of you owes the other for drinks.
Neither of you is worried about collecting.
You probably wouldn't loan him your car, but you might let him be the designated driver.

Obscure-Persistent
Nym only. "No Fixed Address": True Name / stable ID / link, e.g. working email, Nym-associated blog are all lacking. Without account- or post-by-post validation, any such entity will be be Obscure to all observers and habitués. With such, they will be less obscure to some.
Some observers don't know or care either way. For privacy's sake, most can't know on WoC; by design, only Marshals can see the IP and (claimed) email address.
ID unity/entity_continuity is inferred through tone, topics, IP addresses, quirks and habits.
Most sock puppets seem to be Obscure, though some qualify as Oblique.
Obscure entities seem to be more impulsive/less concerned with milieu than Open or Upstanding ones, though it is hard to measure that objectively.
Ironically, lack of backchannel/offlist comm makes vocal O-Ps anything BUT obscure in the long run, unless they are exceptionally well-mannered. This leads to a lowering of post quality due to noise and thread derailment or outright hijacking. Not that that is the only contributor to those.

BS (worst case): The guy who comes into the bar and turns his hearing aid off.
When he gets irritated, he wants the world to know about it.
Maybe it's why he's in the bar.

Oblique/Cryptic
Team pen names, comical parodical posts, other? May be obscure or not; validation of claimed ID under the pen name is generally difficult. High maintenance for readers. Eyes glaze over. Drive-bys are easiest. "Anonymous Coward" on Slashdot is a prime example; the many pen names of Kierkegaard serve as another. Also, of course, Bourbaki in mathematics.

BS: Hard to categorize. Could be a creep, could be a nebbish,
could be just some poor salaryman in for a quick nip after work,
with a joke to tell. Could be a geeeeeenius. So?

Write. Think. Learn.

2007-01-08T14:02:00.000-08:00

I'm still far from as gumptious as I wish to be; the lack of activity here indexes that.

My current "hammock" is that I'm just enough better off financially than I was four months ago that I can get by without really getting passionate about anything, including self-improvement, learning, making new friends... I did spend the New Years' weekend visiting friends and acquaintances who have a higher setpoint than I, and it was invigorating, but the buzz has ebbed a week later.

Now comes this, via Kathy Sierra over at "Creating Passionate Users": a slideshow by Michael A. Covington: "How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily" .

I haven't absorbed it all, and I sure haven't applied it yet, but it appears to be good stuff, including some commentary on epistemology (the study of how we know what we know). Mmm, yummy epistemology.

Someone (I think it was Charles Fort) once said "to measure a circle, begin anywhere".

When I'm stuck in ruminating about my failings and limitations, there's little room for improvement -- the possibility of change gets crowded out. I'm noticing I've spent another large chunk of time there lately.

I won't apologize; nobody asked me to do that :) . I'll just make a silent pledge to myself, and see if the result shows up here and elsewhere. Hint: it will involve writing, thinking and learning.

Honeywell Nobel Interactive Studio

2006-11-20T13:08:00.000-08:00

Via Newscientist.com I find that Honeywell has a website that features video interviews of and lectures by Nobel laureates. I anticipate many hours of ~~distraction~~ edification. Joe-Nort says check it out. Honeywell Nobel Interactive Studio.

Anglospherics and "medical refugees"

2006-10-21T07:18:00.000-07:00

In times past I've researched getting various things medical from various places not-near-me.

Things such as LASIK/Visex-Wavefront (the latter being really cool) for my eyes, dental work, and so on. I've always thought mostly in terms of getting the work done in what has uncharitably been labeled "fly-over country" -- the Midwest of the U.S.; I've also considered getting prescriptions from Canada.

It would not occur to me to get elective / cosmetic surgery done in South America, say; and the idea of getting some very annoying floaters taken care of in the Former Soviet Union by having my vitreous humor removed, ultrafiltered, and returned, as was once advertised, gives me a frisson of fear. Ditto, if a bit less so, for getting the floaters zapped with a YAG laser in China. One trouble is the fundamental long-term outcomes of the exact practices used. Another is the difficulty and cost of followup or having the original doctor or team handle complications, if any.

Comes now word from Wired.com of news from the NEJM that India is thinking of creating a new form of visa "specifically for medical refugees" -- such as one man who reportedly got a cardiac surgical procedure that goes for $200k here in the states. It's said the procedure cost $6700 there. No word on the ancillary transport, lodging and opportunity costs, but it's implied that he didn't have to sell his house. And it would appear it was a full-on standard procedure with adequate aftercare.

Expect more of this sort of thing, even if travel gets harder and harder. It might drive prices up in India.

All our Bayesian are belong to them

2006-10-08T21:51:00.000-07:00

This just forwarded from a friend (emphasis and added link(s) mine)... ...and no, he doesn't work for Google. I ...think... that this is just a coincidence...

Apparently, I offend their chief.

No, I'm not including the probably-a- poison-pill GIF that was attached.

What coder or designer among us doesn't thrill to recognize eternal verities such as:

"you want your boss told you support in your own code."

We've ALL been there, haven't we? I know that *I* always wanted my boss told me support in *my* own code.

Did I ever get? NO! I had no. I had to move every zig! For great justice.

The appended Bayesian word-salad evidently based on a stroll through the HeadFirst stuff made me laugh. I hope you get at least a smirk out of it, Kathy!

{Ed: "Kathy" here is Kathy Sierra, who blogs at "Creating Passionate Users"}

....

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: V____ W___ <nowayamigonnagivethisjerkafreelink@uh-uh.not>
Date: Oct 8, 2006 4:07 PM
Subject: you offend our chief
To:

more complex. deep understanding of why someone struggles Design Patterns, you'll avoid science, and learning theory, to learn how those You'll easily counter with your

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and experience of others, your time is too important
reinvent the wheel

brain in a way that sticks.

The problem is "The Problem Is..."

2006-10-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

Quoth Dr Brin, recently:

The way to truly crush intolerance is the way parents deal with the hysterics of small children. By taking the small hammer-blows, absorbing the tantrum, firmly disallowing any larger harm, and wrapping the frenetic soul in an embrace of patient confidence.

"Calm down. The only way to attain freedom of action is if you learn not to hate."

I replied

In the abstract, you're right. But the parent-child presuppositions one needs to hold to believe this is the sure-fire strategy are vast. And human reactions being what they are, one person's "disallowing" is another person's overreaction / overreaching / warcrime.

Me, I'm only half-vast, and I suspect a sheaf of strategies is a better approach, though hedging the existential risks (as they eventually appear indisputable / too-clear-to-mistake) against one another might turn out to be impossible. Some say the world will end in ice, etc. If it gets too weird, maybe it's just Game Over for "us", whoever "us" is for you or me.

But I'm programmed, in a way similar to the general Western Civ orneriness you've pointed out, to be suspicious of anyone who says "the [P]roblem is..." where human nature and millions or billions of people are involved.

So, maybe, as I like to say,

"The problem is 'the problem is...'" :)

I.e., to circumscribe the situation quickly in order to name a fix quickly carries deep and frequently hidden risks.

But we're wired to want a Single Narrative. So it's always a tough call.

Thus the power of messy, quasi, hemisemidemicoalitions and sheaves of strategies. The hope is that a lot of "us" won't be very wrong for too long.

Somebody who used to post on the Extropy list used to have this sig, obviously influenced by you:

"I am not here to have an argument. I am here as part of a civilization. Sometimes I forget."

A few of the commenters on Winds of Change FREQUENTLY makes me forget. But that's their plan, and I've learned to adopt Dr Brin's suggested strategy with them. Smother them with parenting until they either grow up or ship out. Either one is OK with me.

QOTD: Reality and reliability

2006-10-06T20:55:00.000-07:00

The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors.

--Hannah Arendt

Neat Tech: "Shadow Illuminator"

2006-09-04T18:44:00.000-07:00

Update: Well, dog my cats. Looks as if NASA Ames and some other folks have a competing product and a patent or five to do the kind of thing I mention below, based on Retinex. Interesting. I wonder what close comparison between TruView and Shadow Illuminator would yield. The Ames "Visual Servo" pages are also intriguing.

Too cool not to blog about: Shadow Illuminator. I hope this guy and the people who are working on implementing the algorithm in silicon make a good chunk of change from it. You can submit your own pic and the site will crunch it to produce a picture with the areas in shadow automagically made more visible. If your image is low noise and not highly compressed, you can get remarkable results with fewer artifacts than some of the old typical computer image manipulation tricks. Here's some examples of the potential source-image gotchas. As is mentioned at the top of that page, this tech, or something similar, has potentially huge implications for machine vision. Just think how much more clever the next generation Roomba could be! Ahem.

I'm not sure if any of the algorithm applies Land's Retinex Theory -- especially to really poorly lit areas. If not, there's a bit of low-hanging fruit left and I declare that I thought of it. So I hope that piece can fall in the non-patentable arena But I'm not sufficiently gumptional at the moment to check for priors in the USPTO. [Later: Whoops. turns out several other people {warning: PDF file} already have done work on just that. Oh well, at least my instincts for interesting solutions seem good. ;\]

One thing I want to do some time is try to make up Retinex-style pictures with a camera that can pick up infrared (as many digital cameras can if you remove any IR filter they might have). Substituting an IR channel for a red channel might be interesting.

--Nort

PS: Yes, long time no blog. I've been focusing on other things. There is a backlog of things I want to write about, and some other people are doing some of the work I wanted to do. I'll be posting more about that in my "Wimpy Pseudo Blogroll" soon.

QOTD: The general lesson

2006-06-02T16:09:00.000-07:00

The general lesson that I take away from this bug is humility: It is hard to write even the smallest piece of code correctly, and our whole world runs on big, complex pieces of code.

--Joshua Bloch

Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken. Read all about it.

This chastening reminder is handy when I get frustrated to the point of apoplexy over things like lost work due to Blogger bugs. And other human endeavors. Bloch also says:

A bug can exist for half a century despite our best efforts to exterminate it. We must program carefully, defensively, and remain ever vigilant.

A jagged little pill, especially for the AI / singularity crowd.

On the other hand, it makes me feel better that I can find two silver linings:

A constrained-wordsize (say 8 bits per word) test case could have found this bug with an exhaustive-search test script a long time ago, and that I can see that makes me feel retrospectively smart.
If God-knows-how-many smart folks could miss this one for four decades, maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself when I discover my own errors.

QOTD + homily: Three from Seneca on anger

2006-05-17T17:02:00.000-07:00

This relates to serenity. And to Serenity, for that matter.

My homie Seneca was the rizzle dizzle... He was more or less the Brainiac of the first half of Century 1 (I hear he lived until about 65 A.D., though some say he died much earlier). Here are three from the vault:

"Anger..."

"...is like those ruins which smash themselves on what they fall."

"...if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it."

"...[is] an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured."

--L. Seneca, fl. 10-60 A.D.(?)

These meditations are helping me deal with stress. Really. And that's cool. Temperament traits are in large part habits, say I. And re-directing them after decades of practice? That takes practice -- not the promise of practice, nor the plan, but the real deal. Sayin' ain't doin'. Rem, non spem. That's Latin for "the thing, not the hope."

Getting to where you can remember to (and, more truly speaking, more habitually act in) practice? Well, how do you figure Sisyphus started?

He didn't start by talking himself out of it, I know that. Those of us with "strong Won'ts" can dismiss change with a single muttered noise of deprecation. And that yields -- what?

It's almost a Yoda thing. There is no "try": do, or do not.

A Tibetan Buddhist of my acquaintance once told me that the universe is destroyed and re-created 64,000 times a second. If he's right, that means all of us are, too. Just pick a couple more times each day to take advantage. And remember that you did, and give attention to the fact that actually doing it was (a) a success and (b) less pain than you thought it'd be. Lather, rinse, repeat. Pick something small sometimes.

Cf.: Indignant self dopes, Covey's "Sharpen the saw", Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, The "strong Won't" , Picking on something your own size (all links to be included later)

My Wimpy Pseudo Blogroll, IIII: "Passionate Users"; "Reflective Happiness"

2006-04-21T22:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, the erudite among you will note that I use the classical, non-Julian form of Roman numeral four. The rest of you will just have to figger it out. A one, and-a-two:

1) I found this blog by way of Winds Of Change. "Creating Passionate Users" is the name, but that, as with many good blogs, doesn't really describe where the author[s] go[es].

LATER: Whoops! The "About" page mentions three contributors: Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates, and Eric Freeman. Apologies to all for my earlier error. P.S. The pic on this post is from their site.

Recent gumption-relevant posts appear to include

As might be implied by my desultory posting, I am at chronically low gumption myself these days. I think Kathy [, Bert and Eric]'s blog might help me some there. And I'm looking into this one:

2) One fellow who has devoted his professional career to exploring "learned helplessness" and its alternatives is Dr. Martin Seligman. I expect any good search engine will point you to his stuff. He and some associates have recently unveiled the new, improved Reflective Happiness site.

Sure, some people give "happiness" a bad rap, but I think it's clear that habitually helpless, anxious, depressed or angry people don't always get the gumption, flow, or results they could if they were only episodically in those states. I believe the chosen expression, Reflective Happiness, is aimed at puncturing the notion that happy == fatuous. It ain't necessarily so.

Yes, it's a subscription service. No, I have no financial interest in it. No, I am not a subscriber (yet). If/when I know more, I'll report.

As a final note, some correspondents have asked me to post more personal-experience anecdotes. I think the expression one person used was "Why don't you get off your high horse and tell us something!"

Hmm! In the old days I was never mistaken for a cavalryman. Maybe it is time to get more down to earth for a spell.

Analogies all the way down?

2006-04-14T15:18:00.000-07:00

There's a fuzzy story, nicknamed "Turtles all the way down". It's said that someone buttonholed Thomas Huxley (or Bertrand Russell, or William James, or someone else) after a lecture, and put forth the proposition that our Earth, really flat, is resting on the back of a giant turtle; the question (by Huxley, Russell, or whoever) of what that turtle is resting on is answered dismissively, "It's turtles all the way down, young man!".

Douglas Hofstadter has a notion that for human cognition, "It's analogies all the way down." His Stanford lecture "Analogy as the Core of Cognition" is the place I first ran across it. He calls this notion

a refrain that I’ve chanted quite oft in the past, to wit:

One should not think of analogy-making as a special variety of reasoning (as in the dull and uninspiring phrase “analogical reasoning and problem-solving,” a long-standing cliché in the cognitive-science world), for that is to do analogy a terrible disservice. After all, reasoning and problem-solving have (at least I dearly hope!) been at long last recognized as lying far indeed from the core of human thought. If analogy were merely a special variety of something that in itself lies way out on the peripheries, then it would be but an itty-bitty blip in the broad blue sky of cognition. To me, however, analogy is anything but a bitty blip — rather, it’s the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition — analogy is everything, or very nearly so, in my view.

End of oft-chanted refrain. If you don’t like it, you won’t like what follows.

Fairly far into the lecture (or perhaps it's a chautauqua), he says stuff that reminds me of the fun I have when I and a good friend are thought-riffing; and of how adrift I feel when that sort of thing becomes too infrequent:

Note that what I have just described is not problem-solving, which has traditionally played such a large role in modeling of thought and been tightly linked with “analogical reasoning”; no, everyday thought is not problem-solving or anything that resembles it at all; rather, it is a nonrandom stroll through long-term memory, mediated by high-level perception (which is simply, to echo myself, another name for analogy-making).

To be sure, thought does not generally take place in a sealed-off vat or an isolation chamber; most of the time, external events are constantly impinging on us. Therefore the purely self-driven flow that the “central loop” would suggest is just half of the story — it is the contribution from within one’s private cognitive system. The other half — the contribution from outside — comes from inanimate objects impinging on one’s senses (skyscrapers and sunsets and splashes, for instance), from animate agents seen mostly as objects (mosquitos that one swats at, people that one tries not to bang into as one hastens down a crowded sidewalk), or from other cognitive agents (conversations with friends, articles read in the paper, email messages, scenes in movies, and so on).

I find the themes Hofstadter explores there analogous to some of the work of George Lakoff, who, before he became a popular lecturer with a political agenda, seemed entirely capable of doing actual science. His Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (hereafter, WFaDT) was a breakthrough work in cognitive linguistics; the later Metaphors We Live By, written with Mark Johnson, is a bit more accessible and builds on his earlier work.

I'll save my carping about his slide into partisanship for later. Maybe for never. :)

Work like Hofstadter's and Lakoff's, along with the recently-popular "mirror neuron" stuff, seems to shed light on a lot of things, from the "homunculus" model -- the little guy sitting in a control seat behind the eyeballs, running things -- to why thinking is so hard.

My current take is that even if mirror neurons are not the big deal that Ramachandran made of them in this Edge piece, there's something to the idea that metaphors and analogies are deeply intertwingled with human thought, and indeed with the brain hardware we think with.

Why does this matter? Lakoff makes the case in WFaDT that for much of history, philosophy had a tacit premise that the trick of perfecting philosophy was to get "the" categories right. The notional grail: there's an inherent taxonomy of categories, and once that's debugged, human perception will perforce be subject to ultimate reason.

This gets called into question if all our symbolic thought is running as quasi-opportune patterns overloaded on nonsymbolic hardware.

I suspect abstract categories just don't map the way the color red does. I suspect that an awful lot of "abstract" human thought isn't as highflown as many of us wish. Perhaps I state the obvious.

I have a lot I'd like to say about this stuff, but it will have to wait for another time. For now I'll close with another excerpt from the Hofstadter lecture.

This viewpoint may be overly ambitious, and may even — horrors! -- be somewhat wrong, but I have observed that many good ideas start out by claiming too much territory for themselves, and eventually, when they have received their fair share of attention and respect, the air clears and it emerges that, though still grand, they are not quite so grand and all-encompassing as their proponents first thought. But that’s all right. As for me, I just hope that my view finds a few sympathetic readers. That would be a fine start.

Read the whole thing. He goes interesting places.

My Wimpy Pseudo Blogroll, III: Neo-Neocon

2006-03-22T22:38:00.000-08:00

Worth a look. I'll let my abstract-intellectual mantle slip a bit here: I share some sentiments with this person.

More than anything I have been struck by the following, which also serves as a (slightly prolix) Quote of the Day:

I always find it curious when people act as though, by dint of supporting some of Bush's foreign policies (which I most definitely do), a person is therefore responsible for, and needs to account for and differentiate him/herself from, every utterance made by every person on the entire spectrum of the right.

.... Your feeling that I need to do this might be an indication, I believe, that you feel that each movement is a monolithic whole, and that anyone who espouses some sort of agreement with someone on a certain "side" is therefore responsible for what everyone who supports that person has said, as though we all march in lockstep.

This is someone who appears to be doing her level best to not just be "rearranging her prejudices" -- and to be working on others', as well. Need I say I approve? I do, heartily.

Is the bell (curve) tolling for "light bulbs"?

2006-02-16T18:01:00.000-08:00

Edmund Scientific's Optical boys might have developed the much-wished-for halogen/HID-killer LED. [Press release...]

Update 2006.02.16: some info on how they claim to do it.

Here we go. If this stuff is actually manufacturable, this is the knee of the incandescent lamp curve... and not far from the knee for fluorescents, too. W00t.

I've already seen merch in the local hardware store that has labeling implicitly apologizing for not being LED. Is this buggywhip time for incandescent lamps? Will they be laboratory items only soon? If you need a continuous spectrum they're hard to beat, so they'll still be used in theater and film (production and presentation, both). Apart from that...? People worried about surviving EMP: vacuum tubes resulted from the Edison effect observed in incandescent lamps. And that's about all I can think of.

I really want someone to write the history of this project. Not just the Edmund breakthrough, although that might make a book in itself, I don't know. The White LED was effectively unthinkable about 30 years ago, AFAIK. But I'd love to find out I was wrong.

I am sure there are studies in gumptionology to be found in this history, at least as much so as in, say, Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, q.v.

The biggest lesson in gumptionology I got from that book was a bit like the line from the movie Blade Runner: "The candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long." There is a famous burnout quote mentioned at the bottom of the article linked immediately above. What price gumption (especially in Flow Zero)? Coupland's Microserfs talks about the seductive qualities of being "Version 1.0" -- of doing something groundbreaking.

Groundbreaking can be mindbreaking. No one else can tell you whether that was worth it. And grinding and pumping out 40-hour days is no guarantee of "success" -- what exactly is that, again?

"I Have a Dream", Part N+1

2006-02-15T22:49:00.000-08:00

As my dear departed friend Dan Niemi would say: OUT-STANDING!

Of course this could turn out badly. Of course there are huge potential stumbling blocks--read the whole linked article, which deals with some of them.

But I bet The Hip Gan is smilin' mighty, mighty big tonight.

[Emphasis in the quoted text is mine]

Via the CSM and others:

Under a new constitutional amendment, private schools, colleges, and professional training institutes that operate without government funding will be obliged to set aside more than one-quarter of their seats for students from India's "untouchable" lower castes or Dalits, as well as other socially and economically disadvantaged groups.

The amendment, which will apply to admissions for the 2006 academic year, could directly affect the lives and futures of at least 70 percent of India's more than 1.2 billion people.

In addition to Dalits, who make up one-quarter of the population, there are millions of Indians from poor tribes and disadvantaged groups collectively known as other backward castes (OBCs). According to one estimate, approximately 113 million children between the ages of 6 and 14 are now eligible for reserved seats in private schools.

Hard Things: Admitting ignorance when stakes are high

2006-02-02T21:56:00.000-08:00

OK, I'm taking off the white gloves for this one. We have a long way to go on such public matters as "Climate Change". LiveScience published this a while back, but AFAIK it's still current.

The bottom line, according to a group of experts not involved in any of these studies: Scientists don't know much about how sunlight interacts with our planet, and until they understand it, they can't accurately predict any possible effects of human activity on climate change.

BINGO. Read it all, for it is good. Even such worthies as Dr Brin seem to take Michael Crichton's most recent book State of Fear to task, along with taking him to task -- such being human nature. But, modulo the cardboard (and card-carrying) pseudo-eco-baddies, what I'd paraphrase him as saying in that book is "We really don't know a hell of a lot about a great deal of crucially-important stuff, and all the hand-wringing and hand-waving isn't bringing us any nearer to finding out." He is not saying that humans are not messing things up, either. As one small example, in a speech for the National Press Club this year ("The Impossibility of Prediction", located on this page), he said:

I still believe that environmental awareness is desperately important. The environment is our shared life support system, it is what we pass on to the next generation, and how we act today has consequences—potentially serious consequences—for future generations. But I have also come to believe that our conventional wisdom is wrongheaded, unscientific, badly out of date, and damaging to the environment. Yellowstone National Park has raw sewage seeping out of the ground. We must be doing something wrong.

In an afterword in State of Fear, Crichton writes:

Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be a natural phenomenon. Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be man-made. Nobody knows how much warming will occur in the next century.

But it feels good to be doing something, and what if humans are messing things up -- there's no time to waste!, and, and, and.

Because, it's tacitly assumed, the only alternatives to it being beyond doubt that [recent human activities are causing a measurable increase in the average temperature of the planet that presents hazards to life as we know it] are:

You're an ignorant or selfish stooge
You're a selfserving fat cat. Finally, the really scary one...
We're all totally powerless!

Right? Right? Those are the only alternatives, right?!

Humans. I weep for the species. And for mainstream media such as Knight-Ridder, who call up a bunch of scientists that are at the front of their Fil0faxes and (surprise!) mostly find opprobrium for State of Fear. And of course, for Dr Crichton.

Note that I have bones to pick with the works of Dr Crichton, as well. But that's for another time.

"What else could it be but..." works best if you don't listen afterwards. They go together like peas and carrots. OTOH, "We [just] don't know..." can be, or sound like, a cop-out.

Coaxing feedstock from the research funding trough can proceed apace either way.

Are they [/we] indignant self-dopes?

2006-01-31T23:57:00.000-08:00

The estimable David Brin has a blog. And he belongs on my blogroll. But that's not what this post is about. This post is about a piece Dr B did not long ago. It nails some corners down on an idea others including myself have speculated idly about: emotional state-seeking as analogous to so-called "drug-seeking behavior" -- and perhaps more than merely analogous -- perhaps identical to.

David is speculating "ah, with vigah!" Viz:

An Open Letter to Researchers of Addiction, Brain Chemistry & Social Psychology

Though Dr B often delights in being provocative and contrarian, he usually does it with grace and style and substance, and I give him mad Roman Legionary props for that. He's more worthy than your run-of-the-mill gadfly, by far. More a worthy gadversary. When I disagree with him, I must think hard about why and how. And that makes him a gadsend!

Here's the money quote re self-righteousness as endogenous self-medication, near the end:

Why the Issue Has Grown Urgent

We have entered an era of rising ideological division and "culture war" that increasingly stymies our knack at problem-solving. Nowadays, few adversarial groups seem capable of negotiating peaceful consensus solutions to problems, especially with opponents that are perceived as even more unreasonably dogmatic than they are. This cycle is often driven by the irate stubbornness of a few vigorous leaders. After all, the indignant have both stamina and dedication, helping them take high positions in advocacy organizations, from Left to Right.

Might recent exaggerated levels of bilious social division be partly attributed to an all-too human tendency to fall into addictive patterns of self-doping, by wallowing in a pleasurable mental state? A state that undermines our ability to empathize with opponents, accept criticism, or negotiate practical solutions to problems?

May I boldly suggest that this insidious type of reinforcement may cause vastly more overall social harm than every illegal drug on the street?

We're probably a long way from proving anything about this stuff, and of course people will be indignant about the suggestions they see as implicit in all of that. What rich irony. Send in the clown car. Don't bother, it's here.

Phrases: Pumpkin Eaters

2006-01-25T20:24:00.000-08:00

I first heard this expression in a Jethro Tull song. I have come up with my own definition; perhaps I'll follow up with some actual research to see what (if any) provenance can be determined. The phrase is the title of a 1964 movie about a woman who stays pregnant as often as she can, but I think my definition has more utility.

By my lights, a "pumpkin eater" is a gullible person, one who (figuratively) can swallow most anything, and doesn't seem to be daunted by whatever the pain of doing so is.

It helps if it fits in with prior goals or worldview, and of course it helps to have a scattershot approach to reality. Some possible examples could include: people who think all of Michael Moore's work, all the X-Files, all the utterances of a given politician, or all the Late Night Coast to Coast radio shows are great and beyond criticism.

The much-bandied term "idiotarian" is a bit more pejorative, but I'm not sure it's stronger in meaning. I like "pumpkin eater" because it hasn't become fightin' words. Yet. I think.

Note that [as I want to use it] the term doesn't denote a country bumpkin [EDIT: or does it? Etymologically, it very well might. See comments], just someone who is, as Viv Stanshall said in the spoken-word piece "Big Shot", "credulous as hell."

Eric Drexler used to talk about something he called "bogophilia". On that, more RSN.

My Wimpy Pseudo Blogroll, II: Sleep Dirt

2006-01-23T09:44:00.000-08:00

The connections between sleep and mood are well known, and curiously circuitous. I have been wondering how and whether to tackle this, since mood has a big impact on gumption. Enter Circadiana, which appears to be a most worthy blog, and not merely because it gets me off the hook. Its author Bora Zivkovik belongs on my blogroll, as soon as I get around to creating the real thing. A hat tip to MakeZine's issue # 03 for the pointer.

'I love Miss Frizzle from the cartoon "The Magic School Bus". She always says "Make connections, kids, make connections!"'

Amen to that. His top post today tries to connect some dots between sleep and mood in an interesting way. Extended sleep deprivation seems strongly correlated with reduced immune system function. This is more grist for that mill.

Joe-Nort says check it out. Circadiana

Scrumptiousology and "flow"

2006-01-23T06:08:00.000-08:00

You know, this really is one of those "blindingly obvious in retrospect" ideas.

If you can make a three-dee printer that uses hotmelt (or other thermoplastic), why not make one that uses chocolate?

Chocolate is good for my morale, if I don't eat so much I get a hangover the next day. I think I should write more about food. Especially strange crossovers like this idea. The phrase "a flow machine" popped into my mind, and slid laterally. I'd like to be a flow machine...

It's clear my hyperfocus practices usually lead to increased irritability. I figure that a big part of that is ignoring body signals: RSI precursors, bad posture, hunger. It's about attention. Lots of things turn out to be about attention.

In the last decade or two, lot has been written (and sung...) about being "in the zone", and Csikszentmihalyi, of course, put out Flow back in 1991. I haven't read any of his later works yet, in part because (for me) the book Flow... ...didn't. But that's not what I want to talk about. When I first encountered that book, I was struck by its subtitle, which refers to "the psychology of optimal experience". Hmm. Do I detect a classical monad that's subject to dissection?

Varieties of "optimality"

There are varieties of flow, I think. Here's my list:

Level-Zero Flow

Hyperfocused, usually single-tasking, easily thrown by interuptions or setbacks. Exemplified by the "Heraus! Can't you see I'm decomposing?!" joke. A face-to-face interruption can cost fifteen minutes to restore lost state and context; an interruption that results in crafting an email can cost more. This tends to be the kind of consciousness where any music must have no vocals (or for some people, no instruments that *sound* like vocals). For me, at least, subvocalization and verbal-"digital" formulation is frequent, and even dominates, as an idea is executed.

Key characteristics: Focus + fragility.

I call this state "fragile flow", aka "Artists Only" or "the Porlock propensity".

Level-One Flow

Able to treat interruptions as invitations or opportunities. The Oblique Strategy "Honor thy error as hidden intention" can come into play, as can humor, the inability to stay irritated by setbacks, flexibility in approach while being able to remind oneself of the goal, and the ability to engage in civil conversation. Still rather selfish, and can be hard to explain to others (especially people who ask what you're doing, since you might be multitasking with no spare "explain yourself" thread running). I tend to be less self-critical in this mode, and there's virtually no running internal dialogue -- what internal verbal representation occurs is more like the literary stream-of-consciousness in Joyce; hints, not sentences.

Key characteristics: Vigilance + resilience.

I call this state "grace".

Level-Two Flow:

Able to sway or persuade others in the moment, who might nonetheless experience a "WTF moment", or buyer remorse, after you pass out of their experience. Really good con men have this kind of flow down pat. Certain types of crazy people do, too. You're golden, you're sparking; you might also experience logorrhea ;).

Key characteristics: Charisma + persuasiveness.

I call this "R. P. McMurphy flow", after the character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. "McFlow", for short. Like McDonald's french fries, it's a perfect thing in its way, but at the same time bad for you. Plus, you can think you're there when all you are is manic. This requires calibration. Are they laughing with you or at you?

Level-Three Flow

Able to execute Levels One and Two flow while being ethical and respectful (don't scare the horses or parents); able to dip down into Level Zero and surface with the fish in one's mouth without biting others' heads off. Elegant, socio-ecologically-sound flow.

Key characteristic: getting things done while retaining supportive connection with others.

I call this "laminar flow", from the technical term for flow exhibiting no turbulence. It's still possible to be in Level Three and doing the wrong thing, of course. But at least you're not making waves. :) "Slick" people have it. So do wise people. The quality of the flow doesn't disambiguate the two.

"You Can't Innovate Flawlessly"

2006-01-21T11:34:00.000-08:00

One from Tom Evslin:

"Fear of mistakes makes people move too slowly. Fear of mistakes creates endless meetings where people seek a meaningless consensus in order to be able to share the blame if things go wrong. Most important, fear of being blamed for a mistake causes people to cover up – often even from themselves."

The whole article is worth a read.

Several perfectionists of my acquaintance have the problem that they're frequently disorganized and slovenly. I deduce that this is because the order that would satisfy them is virtually unattainable, so they simmer in drek. The meaningless consensus within an individual's society of mind is just as meaningless as anything ever seen in a corporate setting.

And yes, one of those perfectionists is me. More to follow. :) ;)

There's a Myers-Briggs -- Kiersey Temperament observation here: misapplication of "J" (the component of personality labeled "Judging") can really spike one's efforts to build new habits.

QOTD: your goat

2005-12-28T17:15:00.000-08:00

"If you don't want them to get your goat, don't let 'em know where you left it tied up." --Biggus Dickus, Father to Nortius Maximus, fl. 1962-68

I've got a lot to blog about, rahlly I do. The problem is figuring out how to carve it into mind-sized chunks. Let's see what the new year brings, shall we?

Thanks to my seven or so regular visitors!

Four by Herman Kahn

2005-11-13T05:48:00.000-08:00

It's been about three months since I posted here. I've been thinking a lot. One of the things I've been thinking about is how hard it is to have actual conversations. One reason for that is that everyone tends to "know" a lot that isn't so, as Mark Twain observed.

As for people who even know the name "Herman Kahn"? There must be people who can recognize that name without thinking of the Terry Southern -- Stanley Kubrick -- Peter Sellers creation, Dr. Strangelove. Until recently, I wasn't one of them. Then I actually troubled to read Kahn's On Thermonuclear War.

What Sellers & company chose to mock in Strangelove were eminently mockworthy. But it's striking how little of that I found when I actually read Kahn's book, and how much else of value I found there. In particular, the complex structure of kinds-of-deterrence he detailed made specific mention of the dangers of only having a single deterrent -- especially the real world version of the fictional "Cobal-Thorium G" Doomsday Bomb. Kahn apologized for the eight or so different aspects of the problem as he saw it, saying he didn't see any rational way to whittle the number down, and further apologized that he was not at all sure he'd covered all the bases.

The consensus nowadays is that MAD was all we ever had. If true, it's amazing we made it.

I wonder about that. I suspect that many people, both doves and hawks, caught a few words, quickly tuned him out, stopped thinking, and proceeded to listen to themselves and one another not-thinking, at a sort of "comfortable" [sic] remove from what he was actually saying. It's instructive; daunting, if I let it be.

For now, here are four quotes of worth.

On risk:

It is not true, as is often stated in Congress, that one can take no
chances with national security. Today's world is full of risks. Still,
it is not sufficient merely to say that one is taking a calculated risk.
(The term "calculated risk," as nearly as I can see, is always used
in the sense that there is a risk of which we are aware but have not
been able to calculate.) One would like to actually calculate this
"calculated risk"---to get some numerical orientation on what
the risks are. Are we taking one chance out of a hundred that the
Russians have a disguised program we do not know about? Is it
one in ten, or one in three, or what?

[italics as found in the original]

P. 201, On Thermonuclear War, H. Kahn, 2nd ed w/index, Princeton U Press, 1961

On strategy, and getting beyond "playing games"/politics:

One of the characteristic weaknesses of democracy is an inability to
carry out complicated long-term programs in a steadfast and competent
way.... One way to do this is to make a serious attempt to lift the level
of discussion. I believe it can be done, but only if there is on the one hand
some self-restraint on the part of those who are trying to facilitate a
program by the adept use of language and, on the other hand,
much more savage criticism and punishment for those who are caught
confusing or oversimplifying issues when it is inappropriate.
The cure will not and cannot be complete.

ibid, P. 343

On The World Crisis by Churchill:

I know of no better textbook on the subject of war, prewar preparations
and peacetime risks.

ibid, P. 371

Re: Korea:

I do not know if it is possible to explain to a democratic public
the rationality and necessity for being willing to fight limited wars.
If it is not possible, I predict a very dim future for democracy in our
troubled era.

ibid, P. 529

QOTD: re-arranging

2005-08-15T13:17:00.000-07:00

"Most people think that they are thinking when they are merely re-arranging their prejudices."---attributed variously to Oliver Wendell Holmes and William James

Meeting a series of RL challenges...

2005-08-11T22:23:00.000-07:00

...Blogging will be light to nonexistent for another few days. Thanks for stopping by.

Nort

Update:

To all who have offered or inquired: thanks for the kind words of support. I'm back in the saddle again. Working on one or two longer than previous posts, trying to get them right.

N

Adjectives are Bad, Adjectives are Blue

2005-08-06T00:04:00.000-07:00

Adjectives are bad / Adjectives are blue...
Adjectives are mad / And so are you

If you are trying to reason about facts, it can be hard to wade through a highly charged "modifier forest" of debate. I have a simple discipline I am cultivating in myself (mentioned in a comment on WindsOfChange.net) that I'd like to share with you.

Edward de Bono points out that it's easy to use adjectives to poison- or sugar-coat just about anything (my terms, not his). This generalizes to all modifiers, of course.

If you want to describe the chair pictured here in a complimentary fashion, you can call it "iconic" or gush about how it is "tensegrity-embodying" (though it actually isn't); if you want to make it sound like it's going to be torture to sit in or get out of, you can call it "angular" or "unforgiving".

For most sighted speakers of English, adjectives such as "blue" (referring to color) are pretty safe... we take them as objective or falsifiable. "Blue" in the sense of "sad" is more variable from person to person, and in the slightly archaic sense of "naughty", it's all in the eye of the beholder -- or so said the US Supreme Court.

Adjectives can go from bad to worse, so to speak. If, instead of "blue", someone said, "That chair is bad", I'd be stuck with at least a partial puzzle (unless I agreed with that evaluation) -- What makes it bad? Is it broken? Is it possessed by a demon? Or what? And so it goes.

The flip side of this is the bald, ostensibly unmodified declaration, of the forms

(entity) is (quality-loaded-nominalization)
(entities) are (quality-loaded-nominalization)
(entities) (verb)

There are no adjectives, right? What these are really is masked generalizations with implicit modifiers (as is this sentence itself--please try to find a counterexample!)

Just in case you were wondering, two sample utterances of that kind might be

"Republicans are thugs", "Democrats are idiotarians".

What is being indicated implicitly is hard to decipher. Usually, in passionate rhetoric, what I suspect is being intended when someone says one of those things is something like:

(entity) is FOREVER|ALWAYS (quality-loaded-nominalization)
ALL|EVERY (entities) are ALWAYS (quality-loaded-nominalization)
ALL (entities) (verb)

I have to continually remind myself to plug those in before proceeding with the editing steps.

I remap the sentences by removing as many highly-charged adjectives as I can, and then substituting as follows:
FOREVER|ALWAYS ==> SOMETIMES
ALL|EVERY ==> SOME|THE ONE I AM THINKING OF

And then I try to see if the utterance is consistent with what I think I know about the world, and base my communications on that as much as I can (assuming communication is what I wish to achieve).

If this sounds like part of the "Metamodel" of Grinder and Bandler, it's with good reason. It's also akin to something called the "Yes, And..." principle, from improvisational theater. As someone wrote,

By saying yes, and you are forced to accept what the other person said and move on

The downside of doing this too much is that you can sound insincere, or unsympathetic, or like a hyperlogical twit ("Damn you and your Vulcan logic, Spock!"). Those are bad things -- if they're not the intention of your communication :). If you want to alienate, or infuriate, go for it. But do it consciously, please.

The upside of doing this with some sincerity and grace is that you can sometimes defuse a situation and keep a conversation going.

It all depends on the Quality both parties bring to the conversation.

Cheerio,

Nort

de Bono on Critical Thinking

2005-08-05T09:25:00.000-07:00

In my first post featuring Edward de Bono, I warned you that he sometimes likes to provoke. Here's a really good one:

de Bono says: "Critical thinking is cheap thinking."

Give that one a good mull.

If you're like me, you might quickly notice that it's the kind of thing a cult leader, or a fuzzy thinker, would say; and you might be right.

You might also notice that it's the kind of thing someone might say to defend an action, or a line of thinking, that you've just criticised -- by trying to deflect you with a kind of metacriticism. You might even think it's a cop-out.

Accepting for the moment that de Bono's utterance is not any of those, what else could be going on here? What kinds of things might he be talking about?

In the spirit of the previous entry, let me remind you that de Bono is using a kind of shorthand here, and being descriptive. Look at the work of most "criticism" (in the vernacular sense) you see and hear in the world, and see if you can successfully apply this thing de Bono says.

I'll post a followup pretty soon. Contest winners are prohibited from spoiling this by blurting out the answer -- until a calendar week has passed. OK, Mr Bach? :)

My Wimpy Pseudo Blogroll

2005-08-03T19:38:00.000-07:00

When I learn how to do this right, I will; for now, this is a placeholder and shout-out to underappreciated or new blogs I think worthy. I will continue to revise this, so don't be permalinking here, ya dig? --Norty

==

AWESOME thinkers:

My first contest winner, James Bach, has a blog that has two components. One is about software testing, ostensibly. But the dude is saying stuff with much broader applicability. I am sure I'll be mining his writings and trying to clone parts of his brain so I can keep his faculties close at hand. He is one of the best thinkers-out-loud I have ever come across.

Cute chicks who think:

Fräulein Agatha Clay ...is another college student, this time in an alternate history (sorry, fellas!). On perilous academic separation in an alternate-past gaslamp / steampunk romance set in a post-catastrophe Ost-zum-Mitteleuropa, she faces adversity most gumptiously (that's gumption + scrumptious). Rated PG 13 for swashbuckling, mild cursing and occasional flashes of Victorian unmentionables.

QOTD: like archers

2005-08-02T01:14:00.000-07:00

"If there is some end of the things we do...will not knowledge of it, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is."---Aristotle

Cf.: Covey's Second Habit: Begin With the End in Mind. (link to follow)

Man Down

2005-08-01T22:09:00.000-07:00

As I write, it is only a few minutes from exactly one week ago that Officer Dan Niemi of the San Leandro Police responded to a Monday night noise-and-loitering complaint and was gunned down. I can't write much about this case at this time. But I want to share some thoughts with you.

I do not say this lightly---I have at least part of an idea of what a gunshot wound can feel like and do---we've lost one of the few people in this world I would have taken a bullet for. He had gumption in spades. He just might have known more about gumptionology than I'll ever learn. He had areté, Quality, and he wasn't a big jerk about it---that's the wonderful bonus you get when you meet someone with boatloads of the real thing (see below for more on areté, or go here).

Lee Harris, in his thoughtful book Civilization and its Enemies, says that one strength of our system is "team cosmopolitanism"--we don't care where you're from, or whether your family is royalty or ragpickers; the question is, are you on the team or not? "No one here is interested in avenging the honor of third cousins twice removed," he writes. Effectively, the answers to who can you trust?, and on what basis?---are both provided a la carte, not based on clan, tribe or sib. It's not customary for human beings, on a paleo timescale. It is recent, and rare, and it makes the culture something special and worth defending.

I am reliably informed that at least one of the assailant's family was instrumental in securing his prompt capture. I want to tell this person: Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for proving you're on our team. Stay strong; you too are loved--and deeply respected--for this act.

Perhaps some day I'll be able to.

areté

Richard Hooker wrote: "The most articulated value in Greek culture is areté. Translated as 'virtue,' the word actually means something closer to 'being the best you can be,' or 'reaching your highest human potential'....In the Homeric poems, areté is frequently associated with bravery, but more often, with effectiveness. The man or woman of areté is a person of the highest effectiveness; they use all their faculties: strength, bravery, wit, and deceptiveness, to achieve real results. In the Homeric world, then, areté involves all of the abilities and potentialities available to humans. We can, through the frequent use of this term in Homer's poems, make some tentative conclusions about the early Greek world view. The concept implies a human-centered universe in which human actions are of paramount importance; the world is a place of conflict and difficulty, and human value and meaning is measured against individual effectiveness in the world."

In the later culture of Aristotle, areté is also explicitly linked with all human knowledge.

Yep. That'd be Dan. God bless you, Dan.
I hope I can live up to your example.
I wish we'd talked more. I miss you terribly.
Dan's family, I grieve with thee.

***

There's a sentiment from some love songs (so called -- really out-of-love songs): "you can't hurt me any more". Well, let me put the people who are Not On My Team, in this country or elsewhere, on notice. This is not braggadocio, take my word, I'm really not given to it:

You probably can hurt me some more. But you can never, ever, hurt me less; and you've already hurt me enough to reassure me of where I stand. As time goes by, more people I know and care about will die, and some might die at your hands. I'm still betting on my team. I'm betting, and I'm "all in". Better check the odds. You might even be brave, and not just some punk bouncing on amphetamine nerves and Hennessy.

But we will see who turns out to be effective in the world.

META: Two Typography Issues

2005-08-01T22:08:00.000-07:00

I am told that the Greek word " arete' ", which I have used frequently, might not render well in all browsers. I am researching this.
I am experimenting with the medium. In order to catch hurried readers' eyes, or when I am passionate or playful, I throw "too much" emphasis and bolding in. Yes, this clutters up the page. There is a solution for this, based on another thing proposed by my friend Don de la Mancha, but Blogger and the Web aren't able to support it yet. And I haven't figured out how/if Blogger can do footnotes, or I'd use them to streamline things. Stretchtext, where art thou?

I beg your indulgence. I pray thee: construe my meaning; wrest not my method.

Thanks for reading. (This post has been back-dated.)

Gumptionology: an Exegesis, Part the Zeroeth

2005-07-22T01:49:00.000-07:00

Gumptionology is, in a few words, the art of not losing steam.

Cf.: Covey's First Habit: Be Proactive. (links to follow)

The term was coined by Robert M. Pirsig. In 1974, William Morrow and Company published his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (hereinafter, "ZAMM"). It went through five hardcover printings in April through October of that year. In a word, it was popular.

Things that attained popularity thirty years ago tend to have a kind of patchouli patina on them.

I think that a lot of what Pirsig wrote deserves a fresh scrubbing and close examination. Some people on the 'net have taken up the cause of a Metaphysics of Quality, and though I make no claims for what they've done with it, I think Pirsig's writings themselves on the matter can be a worthy source of inspiration. This blog is probably too small a place for it. I'm not going to provide links for it, because I don't know a really head-and-shoulders-above-all place to point you to for cutting edge M0Q work. Seek and ye shall find... perhaps.

[Later: Oh, all right. Here's a Pirsig/ZAMM page that seems to be a sort of clearing house. No warranty express or implied, etc., etc.]

My focus here and now is tighter. My inspiration and this blog's name are taken from 22 pages of ZAMM: pp. 272-293 of the 34th printing of the Bantam paperback (if you don't have that edition, it's at the very end of Part III, and occupies most of Chapter 26). As time goes by, I might be excerpting much from those pages, unless/until I get a cease-and-desist from the publisher. I hope for the best, since my intentions are good. But I expect nothing. ZAMM isn't scripture, nor will this blog be a slavish toe-sucking of same. But I might keep coming back to it. It's not a bad wampeter, as wampeters go.

The main thing I want to be on about, in future, is perhaps pointed to by this fragment, taken from the very end of Pirsig's Chautauqua on gumption:

"....Some could ask, 'Well, if I get around all those gumption traps, then will I have the thing licked?'

"The answer, of course, is no, you still haven't got anything licked. You've got to live right too. It's the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts....If you're a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren't working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together.

"But if you're a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days aren't going to be quite as sloppy as the preceding six. What I'm trying to come up with on these gumption traps, I guess, is shortcuts to living right."

The Purpose of Thinking

2005-07-21T04:39:00.000-07:00

Edward de Bono's work deserves more attention than it seems to get.

I want to talk about some things he's said that, stated baldly, are almost guaranteed to start a virtual fistfight. Here's one. Socratically, he asks:

"What is the primary purpose of thinking?"

Think about that for a while, please---or try to; it can be a big slippery question, like a 600-pound lamprey: what the hell is this thing doing in the boat with me?

(Pardon me, please: I'm deliberately formatting this so that the latter part of this post is "below the fold" on most browsers. Scroll down when you're ready.)
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de Bono provides this answer to his question:

"The primary purpose of thinking is to abolish thinking."

What could he possibly mean by that?

Audience participation is encouraged. I'll tell you what he says soon enough.

Diogenes, Nasrudin, Quixote, and Link Rot

2005-07-21T02:34:00.000-07:00

Diogenes, it's said, once made a point of going about with a lamp, looking for an honest man. Nasrudin rode about on his donkey, telling people he was looking for his donkey. Don Quixote---well, you know about Cervantes's Don Quixote, don't you?

I'm in good company.

The first-linked-to article on Diogenes says "Diogenes left behind him no system of philosophy. After the example of his school, he was more attentive to practical than to theoretical wisdom."

Then, below, it says "The author of this article is anonymous. The IEP is actively seeking an author who will write a replacement article."

<-- NB: THESE TWO THINGS TAKEN TOGETHER ARE IRONIC
{/nonBritishCommonwealthReader=off} -->

The second article linked to in my first sentence is an amusing one, but I have no idea how long it will remain at the other end of the link. Cynically, I expect that eventually it will 404.

The noble Wayback Machine might be of some service in that event. But, un-fed by the advertising engine that is Google, its snapshots are infrequent. (No gratuitous link to Google will be provided; as an advertisement put it about the Pepsi Generation, "If you're livin', you belong.")

<-- {RicardoMontalbanAccent=on} -->

Above, I spoke of being in good company. My company is not with Cervantes himself: my life has not been that hard. Above I made my expectation clear that you know of Don Quixote. But ah, Don de la Mancha and I! We have shared many conversations. Especially, we have discussed honesty, compassion and objectivity, and beauty and love, and the kind of life that is worth living, long into the night.

But that was long ago. And now, the Don languishes in a kind of spell. He is convinced that the structure that surrounds him is maintained by madmen. That a governor's clumsy tongue is evidence of idiocy. This and many other things he believes, and some of these things contradict each other. I fear my friend the Don is deluded. We do not speak very much any more.

But that, though it brings my heart much sorrow, is not what this posting is about. No, this posting is about the bright shining image of what the Don wanted to bring to the world---and still does, may God bless him!, and he's still, most tragically, right---before the world turned down a path that was maddeningly close... and it is about what we must, maddeningly, settle for, if we are to live in the world as it is.

He wanted to create a world where practically nothing ever went out of print, you see. Where link rot and 404s (though he did not call them that) were only the result of court orders. Where one could revise and correct, but each version remained intact. Where one, anyone, could trace the progress of a work, of literature itself, as it iterated, and grew, spreading its leaves to catch as much Quality as it could.

Richard Gabriel has tilted at the "Worse is Better" windmill for some time, and he has blown hot and cold about the concept since his original paper. My old friend the Don, and those who labored with him, and I in my small way, had "The Right Thing" in mind.

It is pointless to speculate how much better the world would be, had Project Xanadu actually shipped, and more importantly, caught on in the marketplace. Arguably, it couldn't have---it was too different, not just-different-enough. And I am mostly at peace with that. I will not address any of the calumnies of the past, written by those with cheap eyes. No, the truth is that Xanadu came with too many strings attached, and that is that.

In a way, it is poetic justice that I, and you, must settle for a literature not too much better than the paper one of yore---and even, on some axes, worse, for paper survives where bits do not.

One must satisfy oneself that sand painting beats not painting at all. Tantric Buddhist or Navajo, or sui generis---if you want to paint a perfect painting, it's easy; just make yourself perfect and then paint naturally. Gumptionology is about "making for" the port of perfection, without letting perfectionism, or a sea of troubles, thwart you.

<-- {RicardoMontalbanAccent=off} -->

I, Nortius: being a Species of Introduction

2005-07-20T08:39:00.000-07:00

Hello, I'm the Nortius Maximus (he said, humbly). Well, no, not this Nortius Maximus, I mean, well, obviously.... No, no, I'm sure he's a perfectly fine fellow and all that... Well, look, if you're going to be that way about it... well, I mean, "the" Blogospheric Nortius Maximus, I mean, clearly, I am---just Google me.... Oh very well.

"At least, for the moment, I appear to be the Blogospheric Nortius Maximus." (Happy Now?) Ahem.

My boon compatriot 'Marcus Cicero' (of Blogger, Winds of Change and now Donklephant, q.v.a.) suggests it's time I broadened the Nortius Maximus brand by starting a Blogger account. Here I am.

About the blog name: The term "gumptionology" is from Robert M. Pirsig. He's a worthy man. Of him, and it, more later.

About my nom de plume: In days gone by, a misbehaving urchin asked to identify himself might say, "Puddin' Tame. Ask me again, I'll tell you the same!" If asked again, he might repeat that, as promised---or (eventually) escalate: "John Brown. Ask me again and I'll knock you down!" The latter's pugnacity might startle an adversary enough for the speaker to escape---or at least give notice that his name was "none of your bee's wax", as the saying went. (Does that saying still go? Please advise...)

In a similar vein, in Monty Python's Life of Brian , "Nortius Maximus" is how a Roman Legionary identifies himself to Brian's mother, before doing something he probably oughtn't. It's a bad joke the Pythons probably encountered in primary school: Nortius="Naughtiest"; Nortius Maximus="Most Naughtiest"---geddit?

So: picture me as a Roman citizen who, rough around the edges, irreverent, wondering if he ought to be caught doing this, is still willing to be a part of his civilization. I vow I'll keep my gladius strapped, mostly.

My apologies: this post is a trivial, exploratory one. One of the things I want to see is how long it takes for comment sp@m to arrive. I'll bloviate soon enough.