Viviomancy

I'm moving...

2009-08-07T00:01:00.002-05:00

this site in the next couple of weeks. Been wanting to restart the blog and I think a new location that is a little more under my control is better. I also want to get back into the Zilch research that I was doing when life decided to interrupt.

I think I've come to terms with my nerdiness at any rate, and a new website will signal that change in direction.

Wow... (update on Zilch research)

2008-11-10T00:06:00.003-05:00

I grossly underestimated the size of the game space. I was thinking it'd be in the billions. It turns out to be about 64 trillion states. Searching the space will require some memoization to speed up the time (because the expected value nodes are 55,987 branches wide) , but I can't memoize the entire space unless I had an exabyte of RAM available (need someone to get on that real quick :D). I'll use some strategies to reduce the size of the space, and maybe a caching strategy to only memoize the states that are needed at the moment. More updates as I progress tomorrow. I need my sleep.

I officially dislike Blogger's formatting...

2008-11-09T04:09:00.001-05:00

It is impossible to format code in Blogger without Blogger ripping it apart... is there a solution for this or do I need to move to WordPress?

Study of the game Zilch part 1

2008-11-08T20:22:00.022-05:00

You know you're a math nerd when you analyze a game to determine the best strategy. Be forewarned, the following post is really math intense; abandon all hope of avoiding nerdhood ye who enter here...

I have been introduced to a wonderful game called Zilch on Kongregate. If you want to lose hours of your life, go to Kongregate and check out all of their cool flash games, all of which you can play for free. :) The reason I wanted to talk about Zilch is that it is a great game that illustrates some of the interesting corner cases of game theory. I will be breaking up this analysis into several segments in order to discuss different aspects of the game, and the process one could go through in order to come up with a winning strategy for the game. This first segment will discuss the scoring and expected value of a hand, and will end with an analysis of an interesting situation in the game that has an unexpected strategy.

Let's start with a quick summation of the rules. Players play in turns, and attempt to score points by rolling dice for a hand. Once one player gets to 10,000 points, the other player has one more turn in order to attempt to beat the crosser's score. Scoring for a hand works as follows: you roll 6 dice, and every turn you have to score something and either bank or roll. You score based on the following scoring rules:

1 one: 100 points
1 five: 50 points
a set of three or more dice: 12.5*base*2^dice. The base is the die value in points or 10 points for a one. For example a set of 4 sixes, it scores 12.5*6*2^4=1200 points. 6 ones is the largest score in the game worth 8000 points.
a long straight 1-6: 1500 points
three pairs (not necessarily unique): 1500 points
nothing: if a roll of 6 dice results in no scorable dice, then it scores 500 points instead.

After each roll you take dice off and score them, keeping the points in a "bank". You may score any of your dice that you want, but you must score at least 1 die or get a Zilch for the round, scoring 0 points. After scoring dice, you get the option to either roll again with the remaining dice or taking your points from the bank and ending your turn. This is called "banking" and it requires that you have at least 300 points in your bank. If you are lucky enough to score all your dice then you get all of your dice back and it constitutes a free roll, which can be repeated as many times you can manage to pull it off. If you are unlucky enough to zilch three times in a row, then you score -500 points (this does not stack).

After the first few playthroughs, some interesting strategies seem to jump off. Firstly, if you have a single die remaining, and you can bank, it's usually a good idea to do so, for the probability to zilch in that position is 2/3. If you have two zilches against you, then you want to bank at your first opportunity in order to avoid the zilch penalty. When scoring, it's not always the best thing to score everything available to you, especially in the case of 3 twos. Your daring is really more of a function of what your opponent's score is in relation to your own.

So what does it mean to know the perfect strategy for a game? A perfect strategy is to know based upon any game position the proper play to make that maximizes some quality of the game state. This quality is usually to win the game, but in the case of the online game there are also strategies to obtain some of the achievement badges, such as winning a game without zilching, playing a game with the least number of turns, or scoring over a certain value for each non-zilched play. At first I will be analyzing the basic question of best play to win the game.

Therefore, we need to start by defining the game state. Since we at first do not care how many turns it takes, or whether or not the win is zilch free, or any other qualities of the game other than winning, a lot of historical values can be discarded. The remaining qualities of the game break down as follows:

Whose turn
Your score
Opponent's score
Your zilch run (number of consecutive zilches before this turn)
Opponent's zilch run
Current bank value
Dice state

My approach to determining the proper strategy is similar to how blackjack was analyzed. I start off by determining a "book strategy" which is the proper strategy in a turn based on the state of the game and the dice. From there I'll want to come up with some ground rules that aggregate that strategy into a set number of rules. This will boil down into something like "double down on 11, or 10 if dealer's not showing an Ace".

I could approach this from an elegant mathematical angle, using clever reasoning to determine each step in the process. Instead I decided to brute force the numbers, and get the elegance later when summing up the results. My tool in this quest is Java. Later on I will see how much faster this would have been in a language like Haskell, where this kind of search is better structured.

I represent my dice as an integer array. I then write a function that evaluates a set of dice for the score you'd get if you took everything (no banking instituted yet). After writing some tests to assert that I was good, I then wrote a clumsy for loop to evaluate across all dice:


int dice[]=new int[]{1,1,1,1,1,1};
           int fullscore=0;
           Map<Integer,Integer> scorecount=new TreeMap<Integer,Integer>();
           for(dice[0]=1;dice[0]<=6;dice[0]++)
                   for(dice[1]=1;dice[1]<=6;dice[1]++)
                           for(dice[2]=1;dice[2]<=6;dice[2]++)
                                   for(dice[3]=1;dice[3]<=6;dice[3]++)
                                           for(dice[4]=1;dice[4]<=6;dice[4]++)
                                                   for(dice[5]=1;dice[5]<=6;dice[5]++){
                                                                int sc=calculateScore(dice);
                                                                if(sc<300)continue;
                                                                if(scorecount.containsKey(sc)){
                                                                        scorecount.put(sc, scorecount.get(sc)+1);
                                                           }else scorecount.put(sc, 1);
                                                           fullscore+=sc;
                                                   }
           double avgscore=(double)fullscore/46656.0;
           System.out.println("Average score:"+avgscore);
           boolean medflag=false;
           System.out.println("Breakdown:");
           int ssf=0;
           for(int x:scorecount.keySet()){
                   ssf+=scorecount.get(x);
                   System.out.print(x+":\t"+scorecount.get(x)+"\t"
                                   +(double)scorecount.get(x)/466.56
                                   + "\t" + ssf
                                   + "\t" + (double)ssf/466.56);
                   if(!medflag && ssf>=23328){
                           medflag=true;
                           System.out.println("<=== Median");
                   }else System.out.println("");
           }

My goal here was to get the average and median scores from the first throw. This data would be useful later in understanding strategies and would allow me to develop the infrastructure needed to walk the state space of this game.

Results? You can execute the code yourself to get the score layouts. :) Here are the highlights. I get an average score from the first throw of 426.60. That's a lot of potential... what that tells me is that with average throws I should be able to score my 10,000 points in about 23 turns. The median of the first throw is 250 points, and your chances of having a bankable score at the start are 44.58%. If I only count bankable throws, and take worst case scenario of zilching otherwise, I get an average score of 341.78.

That told me a lot of info, but not everything I needed. I now wanted to evaluate based on the second and subsequent throws, meaning I'd have to evaluate with less dice. The idea of writing that horrendous for-loop structure was scary, so I decided to go a bit more functional. And man, Java didn't make it easy. :D

In order to evaluate across all dice of any number, I decided to stay with my int[] strategy. I started by writing a couple of generic interfaces:


public class ZilchCalculations {

    public interface DiceCalculation<X>{
            public X evaluate(int[] dice);
    }

    public interface TreeCollate<X,Y>{
            public X collate(X values, X nv);
            public X ret(Y st);
    }

The first interface allowed me to make a calculation across dice. The second allowed me to collate that calculation across those dice combinations. Notice how I've abstracted the evaluation structure and the Collation structure. Essentially these interfaces will act as containers for function objects, much like a C# delegate structure. Next is to do the actual evaluation and collation:


public static <X,Y> X acrossAllDice(int numdice,DiceCalculation<Y> eval,TreeCollate<X,Y> coll){
            int[] dice=new int[numdice];
            Arrays.fill(dice,-1);
            return acrossDice(0,dice,eval,coll);
    }

    public static <X,Y> X acrossDice(int make,int[] dice,DiceCalculation<Y> eval, TreeCollate<X,Y> coll){
            if(make<dice.length){
                    X res=null;
                    for(int d=1;d<=6;d++){
                            dice[make]=d;
                            if(d==1)res=acrossDice(make+1,dice,eval,coll);
                            else res=coll.collate(res,acrossDice(make+1,dice,eval,coll));
                    }
                    return res;
            }else return coll.ret(eval.evaluate(dice));
    }

This allows me to evaluate across all dice combinations for an arbitrary number of dice. The acrossAllDice function creates a holder array for the dice states, and recursion causes the numbers in dice to be updated in order. When I am at the root of the tree, I call the evaluate function in the DiceEvaluator to get my evaluation object, and then the TreeCollate's ret function to put that into a singleton collation object. It then continues to collate as it goes up the tree. I can easily wrap my scoring function in an evaluator:


public static final DiceCalculation<Double> SCORE_CALC
              =new DiceCalculation<Double>(){
              public Double evaluate(int[] dice){return (double)calculateScore(dice);}
      };

and then my collation function for now will just sum the results:


public static final TreeCollate<Double,Double> SUM_UP
            =new TreeCollate<Double,Double>(){
            public Double collate(Double values, Double nv){
                    return values+nv;
            }
            public Double ret(Double x){return x;}
    };

Now to get the average score for 6 dice? acrossAllDice(6,SCORE_CALC,SUM_UP)/Math.pow(6.0, 6.0). For 5 dice it's just acrossAllDice(5,SCORE_CALC,SUM_UP)/Math.pow(6.0, 5). That seems like a lot of work just to be able to make a small change like that. Let's show the power of this approach. Say I want to collect all the scores into a list for stat evaluation:


public static final TreeCollate<List<Double>,Double> COLLECT
              =new TreeCollate<List<Double>,Double>(){
              public List<Double> collate(List<Double> values,List<Double> nv){
                      values.addAll(nv);
                      return values;
              }
              public List<Double> ret(Double x){
                      return Collections.singletonList(x);
              }
      };

and change SUM_UP to COLLECT above to reap the benefits. Say I wanted to calculate the chances of zilching on a throw?


 public static final DiceCalculation<Double> ZILCH_CALC
                        =new DiceCalculation<Double>(){
                public Double evaluate(int[] dice){return calculateScore(dice)>0?0.0:1.0;}
        };
}

and substitute ZILCH_CALC for SCORE_CALC. To get a tabluar evaluation:


System.out.println("Number of dice\tAverage Score\tZilch Prob.");
                for(int ndice=1;ndice<=6;ndice++){
                        System.out.println(ndice+"\t"
                                                        +(acrossAllDice(ndice,SCORE_CALC,SUM_UP)/Math.pow(6.0, ndice))+"\t"
                                                        +(acrossAllDice(ndice,ZILCH_CALC,SUM_UP)/Math.pow(6.0, ndice))+"\t");
                }

which gives me the wonderful table:

Number of dice Average Score Zilch Prob.
1 25.0 0.6666666666666666
2 50.0 0.4444444444444444
3 86.80555555555556 0.2777777777777778
4 143.5185185185185 0.1574074074074074
5 225.7908950617284 0.07716049382716049
6 426.60108024691357 0.0

This table explains a great generic rule that's originally counterintuitive. Say you're under two zilches and you rolled 2-2-2-5-3-4, a rather unpleasant roll. Do you score the 5, the 3 twos, or both? If you look at the table, it'll make sense that you score only the 5. Scoring the 5 gives you the possibility of scoring an average of 225.79 points over those last 5 dice, meaning your average score is 275.79 (still not that good) but your chances for zilching are only 7%. If you take the three 2s, you do have 200 points, and your average is slightly higher now (286.81) but you've now quadrupled your chances to zilch (at ~28%). If you take both, your average is at 300, but your chances to zilch are now 4 in 9, an unhealthy prospect. It makes sense to reroll as much of this crappy roll as you can.

However, this isn't a soundproof argument for maximizing your score, only a good hunch based on some statistical calculations. The soundproof argument will come from calculating across the entire space, and that will happen in the next installment.

Blog Action Day -- Absolute Poverty

2008-10-15T13:47:00.004-05:00

It's been another three weeks and I felt like flexing my writing muscles again, so I saw the announcements about Blog Action Day and went to the website. Since it is an important topic that needs more focus than beauty pageants can give it, I decided to give it a try. The problem is that I am absolutely no expert on the topic. In fact, after thinking about it for a bit I had very little knowledge of what poverty really is. It has grown to become one of those big ideal words of bad things in my head like unemployment, genocide, starvation, illiteracy.

I have really been damned lucky in my life. I've always had a place to live, never had to go starving, almost always had a job, never been persecuted due to any protected classes, and I've always been able to read and been around people in my life that can do the same. When I grew up my parents never had a lot but they were never truly impoverished and I was pretty lucky to never really experience that.

At the same time all of this fortune also makes one not so observant of not having a job (well right now for me that's kind of an issue, but my prospects are better than most) or lacking the ability to read, or being homeless, or experiencing discrimination, or what true hunger really feels like.

It seemed that my ignorance was showing.

One good place to fix displays of stupidity is to research. I started at the base level with the Wikipedia article and scaled outward. The definition of poverty depends on the setting of a threshold that must be achieved in order to self-sustain, so the first thing that the article does is to differentiate between absolute and relative poverty by classifying these thresholds.2 An absolute poverty threshold is defined in terms that do not vary between human beings, whereas a relative poverty threshold takes into account the economic and cultural situation of the society that you live in.

I've decided to focus on absolute poverty, since relative poverty will bring into the conversation philosophical arguments that betray the actual crisis at hand. Where relative poverty varies from country to country and depends on being able to define a standard of living, absolute poverty is defined as the inability to provide for 2 of the following life necessities (according to a UN report by David Gordon):

Food: Body Mass Index must be above 16.
Safe drinking water: Water must not come from solely rivers and ponds, and must be available nearby (less than 15 minutes' walk each way).
Sanitation facilities: Toilets or latrines must be accessible in or near the home.
Health: Treatment must be received for serious illnesses and pregnancy.
Shelter: Homes must have fewer than four people living in each room. Floors must not be made of dirt, mud, or clay.
Education: Everyone must attend school or otherwise learn to read.
Information: Everyone must have access to newspapers, radios, televisions, computers, or telephones at home.
Access to services: This normally is used to indicate the complete panoply of education, health, legal, social, and financial (credit) services.

It seems to me that many of these basic necessities should be at least achievable no matter what society you ascribe to. However, some disturbing things came to light when I started looking into each requirement on the list.

A BMI of 16? That's practically anorexic. Recently there was a mandate by many fashion boards to prevent models from modeling if their BMI was under 18. Median BMI in the US is around 24. Keep that in mind when you look at David Gordon's charts at the end of that talk to see how critical the situation is. There's something wrong with culture where we can eat whatever we want when we want while models do hunger art to "entertain" us knowing full well they're getting paid well enough to recover afterwards when poor people out there are starving for real and don't even have the opportunity to get the job to earn the food to keep them well.

It gets worse. We as a society can drink water sold in bottles but outside of the US there's many places where 10% or more people don't meet this standard (some places like sub-Sarahan Africa are at 48%). It also looks like I'm preaching to the non-impoverished: 95% of the worlds computers are in 20% of the people, and this creates an information gap in science and education that is much more disturbing than the disappearance of the middle class that we seem to fret about in the US. The housing crisis is a big ticket item in the US, but the unspoken conclusion of the financial situation is the eventual increase in homelessness that it will produce; already 700,000 to 2 million people experience homelessness on any given day in the US (something many of us do see), but that's only 2% of the world total. Finally, in a country with a 98% literacy rate, we don't see many people who are illiterate, whereas the moment we step out of our borders the rate is at 82%. Some places in the world have 50% literacy.

Keep in mind that these issues are also within our borders, and I don't make light our our own poverty problems in the US. I'm looking at absolute poverty here, where there are no houses not made of mud or clay, no running water or water resource for miles, with a lack of food, employment, education, clothing, health care, and information. These are people who don't have a society from which to ask for assistance. Honestly, it's hard to picture such a dire situation in the United States. We have running water and electricity in this country. Libraries are open to whomever want to enter, and after filling out the right forms you can use their computers, which 98% of you are able to do because someone taught you to read. People here do provide food and shelter to those in need (although more need to take the call to arms).

I guess the point is that I'm not alone for not seeing many of these issues. I live in a country that comparatively has not seen absolute poverty (at least not yet, depending on the markets), and have lived my life never truly being at the point where I was deprived of any of the above. Therefore, I have no true focal point.

And neither does the world. Interestingly enough, people argue so much over the statistics that I couldn't find an absolute answer to how many people suffer from absolute poverty. I guess that it's a hard question, mainly because of those 8 conditions above no one seems to have drawn up the necessary Venn diagram and counted the intersections. One way to estimate the problem is the World Bank's threshold of extreme poverty, which is living on less than $1.25 a day (based on 2005 Purchasing Parity Power). No matter what part of the world in which you live, it seems difficult to be able to maintain 7 of the 8 conditions above on a salary of less than $37.50 a month. (Wow, I have $40 in my wallet currently. How much money do you have in your wallet? Could you live on only $40 over the course of a month? Anywhere?) From the World Bank:

Using improved price data from the latest (2005) round of the International Comparison Program, new poverty estimates released in August 2008 show that about 1.4 billion people in the developing world (one in four) were living on less than $1.25 a day in 2005, down from 1.9 billion (one in two) in 1981.

I guess we're doing better? It still seems pretty horrific that 25% of people in the developing world suffer from extreme poverty. I'd be willing to bet that at least the majority of those suffer from absolute poverty, per my arguments above. Do we see any of these people? How about in the US? In my research today, I couldn't find a US indicator of extreme poverty by the World Bank rules, because here we define it at less than $10,000 a year, which is more than 20 times the World Bank standard. Using that threshold we have 6% "extreme" poverty. Again, I don't want to lessen the horrible situation of the impoverished in America; rather, I simply want to convey how hard it is to find people who experience extreme poverty by World Bank standards and how incomprehensible of a problem it is.

In that same talk by David Gordon where we got the 8 requirements for human sustenance, there's a summation statement (oddly enough in the middle of the talk):

Fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society.

This is pretty profound. I couldn't even imagine how it feels not to be able to provide for my most basic needs, and there are so many people at this critical level. Not only that, the purpose of society is to assure their members that these choices and opportunities are being met, that it is possible to satisfy these 8 necessities. Anything less of that is inhumane and undignified. And to think how large this problem is.

Really, 1.4 billion? I can't imagine 1.4 billion dollars, let alone 1.4 billion suffering people that need that money on a daily basis. And I had to research how bad the problem is? It's no wonder that those in absolute poverty feel voiceless in society and why it's important for the relatively wealthy to speak up and act on their behalf and for the support of their welfare.

On speculation...

2008-09-22T23:21:00.006-05:00

I have not posted in three weeks. I reckon that I will be fixin' this now.

I decided to start a book club for speculative fiction. The idea formed over coffee on a Sunday with a good friend of mine and her friend. We got together for Scrabble and conversation (I did tell you I was a nerd, right?) and had a long discussion about 3-letter words and science fiction.

It's real hard to convince a book club to discuss science fiction. This is due to a bad rap the genre has received. Some of it is deserved; good science fiction depends on not only a modest understanding of the science, but also a sharp understanding of fiction. This makes it at least twice as hard to write as other forms of fiction. Now a great sci-fi novel will also take in elements of sociology, history, anthropology, psychology, and common sense in realistic amounts just to rattle your bones. The best sci-fi will do this to make you really think and learn from it. It's so easy to fall short of this mark, thus no wonder that there's so much crap out there to sift through.

I decided upon starting not a science fiction group, but a speculative fiction group. There is a slight distinction; speculative fiction centers more upon the concept of speculation, or the forming of hypotheses. These are predictions, and are notoriously fickle. The key is that it doesn't need to be about technology, just a hypothesis with a fleshing out of the consequences of what that hypothesis entails. This includes books like 1984 and A Handmaid Tale which are more about utopian and dystopian futures than about science, books like the Difference Engine and The Man In The High Castle which are more about alternative history than science. The thread that connects all of these books is the idea of asking "What if?" and not the science, even if the act of forming hypotheses is at the root of science.

I call the group S3 and we're listed under meetup. I won't link directly due to google's nosiness and my persona firewall.

It is SO important to ask this question, especially in our times. I just listened to this wonderful Web 2.0 seminar about the information overload being more about the failure of filters than the sensory overload. He goes one step further in the talk to conclude that the shift in economics caused by the Internet (a post-Gutenberg economy) changes the responsibility of a filter on content that breaks many social systems that now need repair. Our technology is changing so fast that we need to think ahead of it to make sure we're ready for it when it gets here. And that's where speculation will save us. At the speed we're going, we can no longer afford to be blindsided.

I read 1984 when I was a teenager and it changed my life. I would never believe that people would fall into such a regime, or allow themselves to be so brainwashed. Then I read the book and was crestfallen at Winston's prediciment. Orwell really knew how to ask "What if?" and how to make you feel for the main character and understand his points on an emotional level. We use the term "Big Brother" now in honor of Orwell's work.

The only thing I felt that was missing from 1984 was a lesson. It wasn't meant to have one of course; "He loved Big Brother" says much more to force you to get your own conclusions. However, it doesn't give good instruction to fight the dystopia. Nowadays, we need it spelled out. Our society is facing the abyss of a Eurasian totalitarianism due to the very filter failure mentioned two paragraphs ago. It's just as serious as the impending crash in the markets, and will blindside us just as quickly, even though people have been talking about it for years before it happened.

Tonight I read a WONDERFUL speculative fiction novel written by Cory Doctorow called "Little Brother". I can link to the entire text because Doctorow in his wisdom released it under Creative Commons. This (advanced) juvenile novel tells of a totalitarian state caused by a second terrorist attack. It was one of the quickest reads I have ever encountered. The story parallels and evokes many 1984 themes; even the protagonist starts off with a handle "W1n5t0n". It grows wildly from this trope though, and extends into many subjects that touch on the state-of-the-art. It hits some very serious subjects in an intelligent manner. The biggest plus though is that it forces you to ask "What if?" and feel it on an emotional level. You really get to care about Marcus and his situation, and compare it to real life. Finally, Doctorow gives us some really good lessons, some of them highly subversive. This is one of the most patriotic novels I've ever read, and it really is a MUST read in our times. I'll be dedicating another post to just reviewing many of the topics of this book in the next couple of days.

These are the kinds of books that need to be discussed in book clubs. Fervently. With high amounts of disagreement. And lots of growth in knowledge, wisdom, and character. We will be discussing this kind of fiction in the S3 (maybe not as heavy, but just as playful).

Okay, now to get some sleep. The markets should prove to be interesting, as there was some aftermarket activity that makes me think tomorrow will be a really down day. Of course the real fun occurs when the short-selling rules are no longer in effect on October 2nd. That day will be filled with a completely different form of speculation, and it won't be good.

And that reminds me...

2008-08-30T00:04:00.002-05:00

It's raining like mad outside
and that reminds me that I need to write in my blog
and that reminds me that I walked home tonight
1 and a half miles
and that reminds me that I copied "and that reminds me" with ctrl-c
because I'll use it a lot
and that reminds me that I composed this poem while walking home
and that reminds me that I'm still creative
and that reminds me why I went out drinking tonight
and that reminds me that one of my great friends got fired today
and that reminds me that today is yesterday
and that reminds me that I recited the poem I'm typing in while I walked home
and that reminds me that I'm blogging after a night of debauchery
and that reminds me that I should be more cautious after I drink
because I am publishing this and I have responsibility
and that reminds me of this great XKCD comic
and that reminds me that CTRL-C allows me to repeat "and that reminds me"
and that reminds me that what happened to my friend was totally not fair
and that reminds me to polish my resume
because companies aren't fair, regardless of how cool they are
and that reminds me that someone could find this poem
and that reminds me that I don't care
and that reminds me that I was yelling this poem
soaking wet
while walking home
and that reminds me that I ran into two people while walking home
also soaking wet at the time
holding hands
and it was sweet
and that reminds me that people in this world are still honest and good
and that reminds me that I forgot half the poem
because I was drinking
and that reminds me that I don't care what I say
and that reminds me that I walk home which is the responsible thing to do when you drink
and that reminds me that my wet clothes are strewn across the apartment drying off
and all of that reminds me that I'm alone
and that reminds me that I shouldn't care
because I'm still known and cared for
and that reminds me that I remembered that people cared about me while I was walking home
soaking in the rain
and that reminds me that people are good in this world
and that reminds me that I have more to write in order to inspire others
and why does that reminds me that I've been drinking?
and that reminds me that I don't drink often, only during life events and social gatherings
and that reminds me how few of those events there are
and that reminds me of how honest I'm being
and that reminds me of how much I've lost
and that reminds me of how hard I'll have to work to gain it back
and that reminds me that I just walked 1.5 miles in the pouring rain to get home
and that reminds me of how sobering an experience that was
and that reminds me of how far I am from everyone that I love
and that reminds me of how fragile and short life really is
and that reminds me of how much harder I need to work
and that reminds me that my sister called me at 1 am to ask me what song that was
and that reminds me that my phone randomly dials people while I'm dancing
and that reminds me that I was dancing
to get my mind off of troubles, to get my mind back in focus
and that reminds me that I was also singing
and that reminds me that my voice will be sore tomorrow
and that reminds me of how many thoughts are wandering in my head right now
and that reminds me of how many thoughts were wandering in my head when I was walking home
soaking in the rain
and that reminds me that I work for a great company
and that reminds me that a great company can do shitty things
to good people
for bad reasons
and that reminds me that I really should keep my mouth shut
but I don't care
because I do care too much
and that reminds me that our lives are forever lived two-faced
to keep a dream alive, to tell the truth to a dream at the same time
in order to kill it
and that reminds me that i've been typing "and that reminds me" out after a while
because I want to feel it, because I want to feel life again
and that once again reminds me of how lonely it is to live alone
and that reminds me that I have a lot of friends that care about me
and that reminds me of my good friend who got fired today
who told me that the most powerful drug in the world
is Denial
and that reminds me that I need to figure out what my life is all about.

that's it. I'm going to bed. Talk to you tomorrow.

On walking...

2008-08-20T12:22:00.002-05:00

Recently, BlogStamford had an interesting blurb on walking, and I decided to put in my two cents. As commented on his post, I live literally within 400 yards of everything I need to survive, and a lot of extra ammenities to boot. Even the library, mall, restaurants, and movie theatres are within walking distance. When I was working at my last job, I was within walking distance of that, and thus never needed to drive.
Therefore, when I first moved here a number of years ago, I decided on an experiment that started almost by chance and grew into an amazing experience. From June of 2006 to December 2007 I used my car as little as possible (there were 3 emergency times). I finally broke down after needing it for my new position (my commute went from a 30-minute walk to a 90-minute drive). But even though I'm driving a lot now (average $75 a week on gas), I still walk to most places, even if they're miles away. It definitely saves on gas and makes me feel better when I do so. Also, since I'm working from home 3 days out of the week, I'll use any excuse to be in a world filled with people every once in a while. While it doesn't bode well for the amount of money I spend for coffee, it does make it easier to socialize.
That being said, there is a huge issue afoot(sorry) regarding pedestrian safety in Stamford, and with my expertise I feel qualified and obligated to comment on it. I can recall several instances where I've almost been run over (once where the car stopped just fast enough to graze my shin) by cars. I arrived to the point where I actually disregard all signals and just look at the cars to see where they are going, due to safety concerns and in some cases insufficient walking signals. I've had cars actually honk at me when I'm in the crosswalk and I have the signal (more than once driving around me with colorful sign language). To cross the Bedford/Summer/High Ridge/Long Ridge intersection, you have no option but to jaywalk. To cross Broad St from Summer from the east side of Summer, you actually have to cross over to the west side of Summer before crossing Broad, because even though there's a walking signal there you'll never get the signal. Again you must jaywalk or go the long way around. And this doesn't get into the accidents that have happened in town in years back, the lack of lighting along Bedford, and the cars that love to dragrace down Summer (on a walk last night, I saw one said dragracer make some kids cry when startled by the racket from the engine).
I think the authorities are doing a lot already to help with pedestrian issues (the countdown signals are great even though they aren't plentiful enough, and there's a concerted effort to catch DUIs). However, I think that timing on some of the crosswalks would help issues (at least to make some of the streets crossable) and enforcement on the late-at-night dragsters that wake people up at all hours and scare the crap out of other pedestrians, jaywalking or no. Also, during the winter, it'd be nice if there was a bit more effort to make some of the sidewalks walkable instead of just plowing the snow over the sidewalks (I know that the traffic is more important but at least people should coordinate their efforts). Finally, it'd be great if there was some effort to educate the people who do drive in Stamford to be more respectful towards the walking set, as they do move a lot slower and are easier to dent.

In short, I do agree that Stamford is a great walking town. It'll just take a little more effort from the city to make it into a safe walking town.

Making some periodic life changes to break periodic behavior...

2008-08-16T20:36:00.008-05:00

It's not as contradictory as it sounds. :)

So about the middle of August every year, I start to do an upheaval of my life from the bottom up. I realized this when I though about the last time I tried to enact life changes and it was about the same time as last year. It's like a second resolution phase for me. I think the most common reason is that this is when I realize that more than half of the year is up and I have a lot to do to keep pace. Oddly enough my August resolution phase is much more effective than my January one. I think that's because in August I know where I need to be for the rest of the year and am more motivated to take steps (motivation for me is much lower in the winter months).

I had wondered if this is the same for everyone as it is for me. Well, one of the most important lessons of life I've ever learned is that if you wonder about something and the answer can be looked up, look it up. So I did so, by googling for "most common month for life changes". I got three responses: most common month for weddings, births, and suicide. Those are some dramatic and disparate life changes.

Realizing that a month for life change probably hasn't been established (honestly expected it to be decided and that it'd be January), I decided to search for "most common month". This is the list of MCM's that I have determined:

Birth - October (by average) Source: WebMD
Weddings - June Source: ARA via Favorideas.com
Suicide - April (but only by anecdote so I won't provide source)
Homicide - torn between June and July (again not agreed)
Poultry Food poisoning - December
Loss of virginity for teenagers - June
Car crashes - December
Arrested for DUI - October
Tornadoes - April
Pruning Grapes - March
Taking the SAT - June
Catching a cold - December
Catching the flu - February
Plowing (Ploughing!) - September
Lightning strikes in Florida - July
Divorce - January
Mating of Adders - April
Arson - May
Finding "crop circles" - July

And as far as resolutions? There are no stats. I guess it's a new field. There are actually a lot of "significant life events" that do not have an established month, and I guess that's good. Better for some things to remain random.

As for my life changes, the most crucial a bit too personal and I won't share them here. But one of the main ones is to consume food more healthily. I've depended too much on packaged food and fast food, and it's time for me to cook as many meals as I can, saving those meals where I eat splurgingly (spellcheck won't give me that word but I'll take it anyway) to be the meals I eat with others. Another is to get to bed at a more reasonable hour when I can (with work sometimes that is impossible). A third is to get into more social sports, such as baseball, tennis, and possibly handball, if the group that I'm organizing with will start moving on it.

I guess the key lesson here is to know when you're in a rut and try to break it, which I have started to do. Maybe if the world tried to do the same there wouldn't be a most common month for anything. I think maybe that'd be better for everyone involved.

At the airport...

2008-08-11T02:15:00.002-05:00

Flying out of Stamford is a bit of a hassle. :) I try to reduce the hassle as much as possible. For those new to the city, let me review for you the choices you may have when leaving this fine city for JFK or LGA. (I disregard White Plains, even if it is more convenient. You simply cannot trust it to always be able to fly you where you want to go.)

In any event that you leave for JFK or LGA, plan to leave at least 3 hours before departure. The reasons will be most evident in a moment:

1) You can use the public transportation route to get to JFK/LGA. This is the cheapest route but the most time consuming. Both routes involve taking the Metro North to Grand Central. From there you can take a direct bus to either airport or use the public bus system to LGA or the subway to Penn Station/AirTran to JFK if you're really a cheapskate. Either route will take 2 hours if you get the express, 2.5 if you get the local. If you have a morning flight (<9 am) forget it; you won't make it in time.

2) Driving there yourself. This is a bit more expensive, and due to more exhorbitant fees for parking and the higher cost of gas, may not be the most economical for a long trip. Google lies and says that the trip takes 41 minutes for LGA and 50 minutes for JFK; however, traffic will double the length of time, although in the morning this is easily the fastest method.

3) Getting someone else to drive you. This is by far my preferred method. :) If you are without friends who will help you out (take the googled number in 2 and multiply by 4 and think again about asking a friend to drive that) then there are services that will drive you there and pick you up. I used to use CTLimo but now I use Red Dot because it's more convenient. Yeah it costs 60$ one way, but if you company compensates you this is a no-brainer, and it may be cheaper if your trip is longer than 2 days.

There you have it. The only ways to get to the major nearby airports guarantee that you will be travelling for at least 2 hours before you start travelling, or end up paying for the priviledge. Except for one amazing exception, I've never had problems with my flights. Feel free to send me whatever horror stories you have about your airport experience (especially if it was local so we can learn about it here :D) If I get enough responses, I may regroup them and publish for everyone to see, and in the process include my sole exception.

On connections...

2008-08-07T13:19:00.003-05:00

There are connections all around us! It makes our small world even smaller and more interesting. I'll now present two interesting anecdotes of this concept:

1) I have a new neighbor. Her renter's son's ex-girlfriend lives in the same complex and I used to work with the renter's son's ex at my previous job. After talking with her the other day, she told me that her second cousin also worked for the company that I work for now. My cubicle was across from his for six months and I had no idea.

2) Today the EPA rejected the bid by Rick Perry (Gov. Texas) to cut the ethanol subsidy. Ethanol is a curious connection between gas and chicken prices. Allow me to elucidate: Ethanol is used in 10% of gas, causing a drop in gas. It also causes a price increase in corn (heavily used in ethanol production), meaning that chickens (using corn as a food source) cost more for upkeep, meaning a loss of profit and a drop in the value.

James Burke is the undisputed master of such connections, and he had a series of shows (eponymously named) that dealt with these connections (if you haven't seen this series you must find a copy of it or look for it on PBS, it's really fascinating). He believes that the modern world would not exist without all these interconnections. There's also another cultural icon that relates to the concept of connections: six degrees of Kevin Bacon. The essence of this game is that through a series of movies less than six, link a named actor with Kevin Bacon. According to Wikipedia the game was invented by three snowbound college students, but the mathematics world did the same thing with Paul Erdos in 1969 and called it an Erdos Number.

The connotation that a connection usually "shrinks" the size of our perceivable universe is a quaint notion. I'm not sure how to prove it mathematically, because I'm not necessarily convinced that it's true. First we must define the domain of the problem. The closest concept to the "size of our percievable universe" is a diameter of a graph. A graph (our stand in for the universe) is a mathematical term for a diagram with vertices (points on a piece of paper, in our case people, places and things) and edges (lines connecting these points, or connections between people, places, and things). The distance between any two vertices of a graph is the number of edges in the shortest path connecting the two points. The diameter would then be the maximum distance between any two connected vertices.

Here's the crux of the reason why this problem (figuring the probability that a new connection "shrinks" the universe) may be hard. If you define that the distance between any two disconnected vertices to be infinite, the proof is trivial (and closer to human intuition), but this is a flawed assumption in an unbounded set of verticies (IE people, places and things will always be born, found, and created respectively, and new connections made between them, so the set of vertices between these "noun" vertices must be unbounded). It is more accurate to not consider unconnected people/places/things (vertices), meaning a new connection (edge) between them could concievably decrease the diameter of the universe (if the two people/places/things are already connected) or increase it (if the new edge connects two already well-connected "cliques" of people/places/things, such as the first contact between two cultures).

So keep in mind the connections that you make with other people. You may be making the universe larger or smaller as a result of your interaction. Whether or not that's a good or bad thing all depends on your outlook on life. Does it make you happier that we seem to live in a small world?

Edit: fixed an antecedent error in the first paragraph and removed an identifying marker.

Now that's one way to lose those Facebook blues...

2008-07-31T16:49:00.003-05:00

Wow, this is amazing. Ze Frank, master of The Show, Color Wars, and several other great internet art projects, has taken on a really interesting project. He assumed the identity of someone else's Facebook account. I'm not kidding, read about it here and here. It's kinda trippy and I think it's a great statement about the idea of an internet identity, how much time we put into our online persona, and the lack of freedom that results from said representation.

No choice but to trust?

2008-07-15T22:22:00.002-05:00

This is a somewhat heavy post. I put it here to get it out of my head.

I am by nature a healthily paranoid person. I doubt because I've been deceived in the past. This means that my world view actually factors in a bit of disbelief into its model. At times this is unhealthy; a distrust of everything eventually dissolves into total self-delusion. Therefore it is important that we do trust, but that we are very careful over what to trust.

I bring this up because of multiple recent events, of which I'll only bring up one. I usually work with a news station playing in the background (this is a good strategy for web workers to allay some feelings of loneliness that can occur from working alone at home during the day). So I was watching CNBC in the background, when a news alert came in, it was a report about a judgment in favor of Boeing. That wasn't significant, what was significant was the fact that it looped. The lady was speaking, and suddenly the "feed" started looping, repeating the same 4 words over and over. They had to cut away until they fixed "the feed". It seems obvious to me anyway that the remark was pre-taped; what bothered me about this incident was that the reporter in the pre-taping was pretending to be speaking in real-time, with a quick cut-away at the end.

This brought to mind the scene in the movie THX1138 when the lady is reading the daily news on one of the hovering televisions only to have it loop, and everyone shrug it off. For those who haven't seen the flick, TXH1138 is a dystopian (lol the spell checker doesn't like that word, dystopian) movie by George Lucas about an underground consumerist culture that prays to wealth ("work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and, be happy" is repeated over and over in the film as some unholy mantra). The move is pretty good for eschatologists like myself, but is only so-so in popular opinion. My point is that it's really depressing to see something in a dystopian movie happen in real life, and if concentrated upon it removes trust.

Trust is an important faculty in the human psyche. Without it we dissolve into insanity. Without it we cannot enjoy and participate in society. Without it no constructive thought can flourish. Trust must be placed in one's thought, one self, and in one's environment. Therefore, when I see CNBC loop like this I simply shrug it off. Not because it makes me doubt their honesty, but because I must extend my trust in order to be healthy. Extend by corollary: the concept of KISS and the belief against conspiracies must also follow from this premise in trust. Trust allows us to progress unhindered by doubt, and when it is betrayed it causes us to pause and perform cognitive dissonance. Trust assures us that many people out there aren't colluding to betray you. It removes paranoia.

I know all of this is obvious. Keep in mind that I'm a mathematician, and as such am distrustful of jumps in logic. My point that I'm getting to is that in order to survive, we have no choice as human being but to trust others, or to risk insanity, ostrichization, and oblivion. For some reason I felt it absolutely important to prove to myself this seemingly obvious fact. And it wouldn't have happened if CNBC weren't dishonest. It's a curious world when dishonesty spawns honesty.

Mysterious apartments and treasure hunts

2008-06-27T22:27:00.003-05:00

Stories like these never fail to enchant me. Thank goodness there are more people out there in the world wanting to make life more enchanting. I may just leave a couple clues to the people who live in this apartment after me, but nothing so elaborate.

There are some people who know me through my persona firewall and would know that I love these kinds of treasure hunts. I have created seven of them in my lifetime, even though I only ran five of them and only three of those were solved (one was too hard and one didn't generate enough interest). I even got my pseudonym through the design of my second treasure hunt (the one I made too hard). When I was younger, I ran a few of them, and learned a lot of unique life skills and lessons through them, such as how to build puzzles backwards, how to keep people motivated to solve problems, and how to generate excitement. I even learned how to age paper in a microwave :D .

If you don't know what a treasure hunt would entail, you could go to the crappy Wikipedia page on the subject which I refuse to link to, or you could read about some real treasure hunts. The first one I was introduced to was the book Masquerade by Kit Williams. In it, people had to find a golden hare buried in the countryside, using a series of intricate clues hidden in ornate drawings masquerading as a children's book. It created quite a stir, with treasure hunters scanning the countryside and digging in many plots, some of them private property. Other puzzle books such as The Egyptian Jukebox and stories about fictional treasure hunts such as The Westing Game or Poe's The Gold-Bug fostered a desire to create one of my own.

My hunts were usually in a more linear fashion and involved more diverse puzzle solving aspects, some concepts of which I have liberally borrowed from books (I started one hunt with a puzzle very reminiscent of The Westing Game, where players had to match words together to get the next clue). There is a great movie about hunts of this fashion called Midnight Madness about the Luskin hunts in San Francisco. There are still a lot of groups out there that do these competitions and they pass the organization of these hunts to the people who solved the last one.

Nowadays the fashion has hit the web with the Alternative Reality Game, or ARG for short. An ARG would involve finding usually steagographed clues in web pages that would lead you to another clue with a hint that would make you find another hidden clue in an otherwise innocous site. TV shows have been using these to great effect; the ARGs for Lost (www.ocenaic-air.com, Find 815) used these to great effect in order to enhance the viewing experience.

Seriously, I forgot how much fun it was to run treasure hunts. It's a bit harder nowadays, with Google making it that much easier to look up trivia and puzzles easily mined by properly written algorithms. I could get involved in one of the more recent hunts and maybe use that to get my feet wet again. According to the Wikipedia site on Luskin's hunts, there are three that are hosted in the NYC area, and summer is the right season for these kind of adventures. I'll have to check it out.

(PS -- I just found out that the draft system posts in a way that dated by the creation of the post, not when the post is complete... so this post is actually a duplicate. What a dumb system!)

I can ride my bike with no handlebars...

2008-06-26T22:59:00.004-05:00

but I didn't think that I could split the atom of a molecule, since a molecule needs at least two atoms in it.

Or so I thought!

It seems that there's a disagreement on the internets over whether or not a molecule needs two atoms or just one. Some pages have dodged the issue by just saying that a molecule has as few atoms in it to guarantee the chemical properties of that unit. Even Wikipedia splits hairs, saying in one sentence that a molecule needs two atoms, but recognizes that some gases may be formed from atomic divisions of an element and that each division is a single atom classified as a molecule (such as the molecules in a noble gas such as Krypton or Argon).

However, I just think that the Flobots just didn't understand the chemistry or deliberately manipulated the truth to sound better. In any event, the verse sounds better as "and I can split the atoms of a molecule, of a molecule, of a molecule", regardless of whether or not the author was trying to foreshadow nuclear war as it is in the end stanza of the song. It doesn't matter; the song still rocks, and the rest of their album is also pretty good.

Long time no post...

2008-06-15T17:21:00.003-05:00

...and this is where I pretend that I haven't been slacking for the last seven months. :D

Actually I have started a new job at TopCoder and that has been keeping me extremely busy. At the time that I post this, I'll have a few posts ready, so I will be posting regularly. Here it goes to posting regularly again.

Music and muses...

2008-01-01T22:08:00.000-05:00

I just saw this utterly beautiful video on the Fred and thought I'd pass it along. A little early for Valentine's Day, but for some reason this is the right song at the right time for me. The song was done by Amplifico, and they have more songs and an album release real soon, but to download the songs you have to register (might not be a bad idea, but I'm always cautious about such things). I will be writing a post soon about muses, because I saw this really great exhibit at the Met with my sister during the holiday where the muses and sirens in this piece were competing. I didn't know the siren myth at the time; it's interesting to note that while the sirens are cursed for they transgression in believing that they could compete with the muses, they were put up to it by Hera, so the whole thing is just another cruel joke the muses and the gods play. Short end of the story, our muses are not always on our side. It's a good thing to know, and I'll elaborate tomorrow.

Happy new year!

2008-01-01T21:55:00.000-05:00

My resolutions this year are taking a new tack... I already blogged about this earlier in December, and I'm still deciding on which ones to do. I am limiting myself this year instead of going hogwild but I will still be maintaining my 43things account to keep in touch with the long term goals. My New Years celebration was wonderful yet ultimately tiring. I will write more about it tomorrow, but for now I need time to recover from the craziness that was this holiday season. :D

This is the saddest poem I have ever read...

2007-12-20T00:49:00.000-05:00

Time for a little perspective...I decided to write about Bukowski tonight. Charles Henry Bukowski's poem Bluebird is the saddest poem I have ever read. It may have a little to do with perspective; Bukowski is one of the most tortured poets of the twenty-first century, having suffered from acne vulgaris, ulcers, and tuberculosis to ultimately die from leukemia. This man faced all of these medical demons and kept on writing, while being inspired by drink and the race track. I recently watched Bukowski: Born into this and was ultimately moved by it, especially when the poem Bluebird was placed in perspective at the end of them movie. I had no idea how so much great art is inspired by so much pain and hatred, such sadness and loneliness.

Honestly, it scares me just a little.

It scares me because Bukowski went through some really bad childhood experiences and some horrible medical conditions to produce some amazing art. And it required the horrible experiences to produce this art. I hate to think about someone who went through so much pain to produce something that enriches society, because deep down, it means that I somehow have to pay this person back, but ultimately there's no way to do such a thing. Maybe this pain and suffering is allay-able; maybe it's something that should be prevented. But, in the prevention of such suffering, it would also prevent the production of such great art.

Seriously, read this poem at least three times. The first time I read it, I wept openly. Does this make me less of a man? Maybe. Does it define me as a human? Maybe more. Does it seriously mean that people must suffer for their art? It could be true. And that saddens me more than anything.

Dudeism?

2007-12-17T23:52:00.000-05:00

I listen to "The Big Lebowski" podcast (at www.lebowskipodcast.com) as an entertaining discussion of the philosophy behind this rather creative movie. The most recent podcast as of this writing talks about Dude-ism, and in the process presents a website that details this odd religion (although it is more of a philosophy than a religion, but I like the joke). It really is a thinly-veiled homage to the Dude (semi-title character in the movie), but the site itself really prods some deep questions in me.

Religion for me is a touchy subject, and I don't plan to really expound here on my religious beliefs, other than that I do believe that religion is a very private agreement between you and your metaphysics, and shouldn't be aired, even if it influences your judgment. When a faux-religion pops up I do get concerned though, and maybe it's just a silly thought, but what happens in two centuries when your sarcasm is lost and people take it too seriously? At the same time, this is against the very notion of Dude-ism (from the first Dude-etude):

Confronted with this inflexible and unfeeling existence, the Dude in all of us will acquiesce, slyly scribbling a peace sign where a zero might otherwise suffice. “He who gently yields is the disciple of life,” wrote Lao Tzu. That is to say, he abides.

Let's just say that this is not a religion that encourages evangelical action. I find this encouraging. I agree wholeheartedly with the discussion of philosophy, explanation of theology, and exhibition of faith, but I am aghast towards the amount of religious flaming that is present these days, be it about metaphysics, politics, or programming language.

However, this is also not a religion that spurs action, either. One of the greatest promises of religion is its ability to inspire (literally to breathe life into, interpret the etymology as metaphysically as you wish). Dude-ism is actually void of this inspiration, unless you consider the Buddha (I don't mean the reincarnated one). So it instructs you in posture but not in direction.

When I think of my concept of viviomancy, that is one of the most important parts. I do believe in letting the winds direct me, but I also believe in letting the winds inspire and through serendipity excite me. Not all of that can be undirected and messy; as I discussed in my previous post, some inspired actions do take deliberate steps and discipline in order to accomplish. There must therefore be a balance.

While at first this is just a disagreement between my life-view and Dude-ism, it also for me disqualifies it as a religion, and as a philosophical entity loses its pragmatism. Taoism at least encouraged right action and discipline, even if it was restrained and seemingly lacking in form. Buddhism encourages strict adherence to the Precepts in order to encourage peaceful and harmless action.

Sometimes even action is required to abide.

Change in format and mindset

2007-12-17T22:52:00.001-05:00

I have decided to start posting shorter posts, in order to get my writing more spurred. Lately I have lost the reason for the blog in the first place. The purpose is related to the meaning of viviomancy (as I discussed in Housekeeping) as "the act of falling into a vibrant life through serendipity or action through non-traditional reasoning". I haven't appreciated my serendipity recently and I need to recognize that. This is a complicated thought and this may be a longer post than I hinted to in the first sentence, but I need to clarify why I feel the way I do right now.

At first, a lot of my resolutions in my 43 things (look to your left) are the result of mindless desire and direction-less feelings. I don't really know why I wanted to learn Arabic, other than the fact that it looks cool and sounds neat. I really think that I set up my resolutions because I wanted them to come true at the time I made the list and it was more impulsive than it was directed. However, I also have resolutions that are very directed and entirely less impulsive. For example, getting a six-pack is also on the list, and this is entirely less impulsive of a thought. I also have duplicates in this kind of resolution (eat healthier and imporve my diet are the same thing).

In short, I have accomplished more of my impulsive resolutions than I have my directed ones. This is why I feel that I need a new mindset. I now feel that it is possible to "fall into a vibrant life" through disciplined thinking, as contradictory as it sounds. Maybe I'm trying to validate my impulses, but isn't that what life is all about anyway?

I have a big project finishing up pretty soon. I am developing a card game called Zombie which is an unholy mix of bridge, Magic the Gathering, and Trivial Pursuit (in the purpose of getting cogs, not necessarily the trivia). I am actually making it into a Java application, although I tested the game logic in Haskell. Hopefully you'll all get a taste of it soon.

On trivia!

2007-11-26T18:29:00.000-05:00

All of those horribly wasted brain cells. Trivia has always seemed to be the "fat" of the brain's knowledge, all those things that are seemingly unnecessary. As Doyle so elegantly states in A Study in Scarlet:

His[Sherlock Holmes's] ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!”
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“But the Solar System!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently: “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

Trivia as defined in the dictionary, means "something of small importance". I will wax trivial then and tell you the entomology of the word trivia. Trivia comes from the Latin trivium meaning "three roads". What the heck does that have to do with anything? Well, in medieval lore, there were seven "roads" to the liberal arts. These seven roads were called the septrivium (or "seven roads"). The seven roads were divided into 2 sections: the high roads of the quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music), and the low roads of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic). The trivium were considered to be the lesser of the liberal arts and the use of the term stretched towards any fact that was considered unimportant.

When one looks at the quadrivium and sees that two of these arts have been absorbed into math, one is really physics, and the last is really a fine art and not a liberal one, the quadrivium really has no place in modern thinking. But, it is interesting to note the comparison of the natural liberal arts to that of the "man-made" liberal arts, and the relative importance placed on each. Also, logic is also absorbed into math, grammar is really an offshoot of language study that Noam Chomsky has also placed into math and is actually used in computer science, and that rhetoric is really an offshoot of psychology, so the "man-made" trivium is not really liberal arts either.

This all brings me to my point. I see so many of these studies being scientifically analyzed that our concept of "liberal arts" is really becoming the fringe divider between the scientifically quantifiable and the humanly expressible. So, where is the trivia? When I go to trivia on Tuesday nights at Tigin, they ask us questions that range mostly on points of knowledge, facial recognition, and current events. Literally, trivia has changed from the "ability to reason" which is present in grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and permuted into how many 0-dimensional facts that one knows.

All of these can and should be stored on the internet! I would claim that one of the quintessential tasks of the internet is the storage of extreme amounts of minutiae. So what happens when we find a way to link the internet to our minds to look something up at a moment's notice? No more trivia. It's already happening: Tigin puts on strict limits on the usage of cell-phones, laptops, or PDAs. This is because any of these are just appendages that limit the usage of the internet to "cheat" at the trivia competition.

But now is the time to come back to Doyle's passage. He's really and truly onto something: why store any of this useless knowledge in our brains when we should be storing it somewhere as a reference where it can be verified, compactly indexed, and quickly retrievable? Holmes is exactly correct; there is absolutely no reason he needs to know about astrophysics to solve crimes (unless his crimes occur on the moon or on Mars). And if Holmes needed to solve a stellar case, he could just look it up, know it for that case's time period, and then discard it.

Computers do the same thing: this is how cache works. They have a much faster memory on the CPU that they hit again and again when a piece of code is being repeated in a loop, or if a section of memory is being worked upon iteratively. It stores the hit from a previous lookup of something in slower memory (or worse, disk or flash memory) and works upon that, storing the real value on a different cycle later when it's no longer important. To a computer, the memory is filled with trivia, and the disk drive and internet are filled with obscurity. The only part that is truly important is what's currently on the computer's mind, which is in the registers and cache.

I now ponder what that elimination of trivia as a cultural activity will end up doing to society at large. It's an important and ultimately paradigm-changing consideration. People look up places on GPS; they no longer depend on the knowledge of maps, landmarks, and the like. These landmarks were important, but now they are trivia. Almost any programmer 10 years ago could recite you the powers of 2 up to 2^32: now it's not really that important to their tasks, and it falls back to trivia. Is it really that important to mathematicians today that pi is really really close to 22/7? How important is that estimation to carpenters and plumbers? Will the art of estimation be lost when we all have cranial implants that have calculation as a base function? In any event, the art of the bar-born trivia quiz will soon become a faded memory, as more and more people are able to just look up the answers without even blinking their eyes. I don't know what it all means yet, but it is definitely changing the landscape of knowledge, similar to the change in universities when the septrivium was eliminated.

Been a month...

2007-11-26T18:23:00.000-05:00

And now I'll be back at the grind. Things have changed in my employment situation, and soon they will have shifted into new work. It should prove to be more enlightening. I also started competing on Topcoder again, and that was awesome. I will definitely continue to do that; it was as cathartic as it was interesting.

It's extremely difficult to motivate when your feeling of self-worth has been diminished by events that are way out of your sphere of influence. I guess my only way out of it was to prove to myself that I still had worth and purpose to the world, and to deny my 100% involvement in that worth and purpose was to deny society the many blessings it has bestowed upon myself.

That's a real roundabout way of also saying thanks to all of my friends and family who have helped me immensely in comradery, advice, and support.

Anyway I have a second post for tonight, and it surrounds one of my favorite topics. People say I'm good at it too. We'll see tomorrow night. :D

Bonus: Did I tell you how much I like music?

2007-10-19T21:42:00.001-05:00

I have a new favorite band. Welcome to Yeasayer. Fish down the website to find the music, I would have linked to it directly but I make it a point to never link directly to the canker-sore of the internet that is MySpace. Too bad it's a convenient way for bands to advertise, but fight it anyway and listen to the song 2080. Wow.

In addition, if you're any kind of coder, you'll appreciate a song by Jonathan Coulton called Code Monkey. Oddly enough it was linked to the YouTube video I posted last week. Here's the acoustic performance I found. Seriously this song could be an anthem, and it has instantly entered my iTunes rotation.

On Perfectionism

2007-10-19T20:56:00.000-05:00

K likes to remind me of how I love to be a perfectionist at certain actions. It's a valid accusation towards the infrequent updates to this blog, and it's my biggest stumbling block to happiness. For being a habit that's supposedly good to have, it has a lot of drawbacks.

You see, perfectionism is one of those things that make a person function and idiosyncratic and at the same time make them shut down. If you've never had the experience of meeting someone afflicted with this disease, let me elaborate. A perfectionist is someone who labors to remove all imperfections from a particular action before showing that action to all. In some endeavors, it makes sense; when you solder a circuitboard, perfectionism can make the difference between a circuit acting "glitchy" and a circuit working perfectly. Polish is extremely evident in writing, for it separates the haphazard writing of Palahniuk and Keruoac from the sublime of Pynchon and the terseness of Hemingway (sometimes it takes a lot of effort to say so little). These obvious exertions of effort make a perfectionist good inside when someone else picks up on it and compliments.

However, the woe of the perfectionist is multifaceted. For starters, perfectionists are avid procrastinators; they don't like to start because of the imperfection of the plan of action. They usually use excuses related to this lack of planning, situation, or energy to delay really important tasks (even mundane ones) and this leads to dysfunction or even despondency. Second, a perfectionist usually dreams big, because of earlier successes that promote the idea that more effort at perfecting a task produces unbounded quality. These big dreams fly in the face of a currently reasonable and sensible plan. In addition, usually these high expectations usually lead to internal rejection of an outcome that isn't as ideal as mentally pictured. Because of the relatively high frequency of this happening, this leads to depression, especially when the perfectionist broods over what "could have been". Perfectionists tend to dislike probabilistic concepts such as luck, fate, serendipity, and calamity because not only are these imperfect but they can spoil an otherwise perfect plan. Finally, procrastinators don't like to finish, putting in excessive effort beyond the point of diminishing returns, wasting so much quality time.

From start to finish, perfectionists set themselves up to hate the things they do except in that rare time when everything goes right, which they then obsess about and use it as confirmation bias for their admittedly illogical actions.

How does one break the habit? Simple. Do things you're no good at. It turns out that a perfectionist will truly enjoy activities where they believe that they have no vested interest to polish, compete, or succeed. It's the reason I got into karaoke, and why I still enjoy it to this day: my voice is nowhere near perfect, I don't look to perfect my singing (except I do want to increase my range, so there's more music available that I'll be able to hit the high notes on :D), and usually the involvement of a little grog makes me forget that I'm getting good at it. Recently I won this contest at a local bar which gave me a slot for a bigger competition. The night of that competition was the least enjoyable night of karaoke I've ever had. Why? Because my perfectionist side reminded me how imperfect my singing was, and I wasn't able to get "in the mood", even after a couple beers. After that I resolved never to take any singing event seriously, and I've had a good time at karaoke since.

Such as last night, which was at the same bar as that competition. There was no competition, only good time had by all. We all joined in singing along, and had a blast past midnight. I needed sleep that next morning, and wasn't quite the perfectionist at work, but I was also reminded how much more vibrant life can be when you're not so worried about how you can make life more vibrant.

And with that, I'm gonna go work on perfecting my Halloween costume. Er... or maybe not. :D

Been a long time

2007-10-14T19:34:00.000-05:00

since I've seen this video: It's wonderfully moving.
Granddaddy - Beautiful Ground
I could also read the code at the end, having coded on an Apple 2 like that one at school, and I know how hard it'd be to get the timing just right. I'm checking out the whole discography right now. :D

Quick Clarification...

2007-10-10T22:43:00.000-05:00

In my review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I called it Murakami's Ulysses. I did not mean this as a disrespect. It's not unreadable like I remember Ulysses being when I tried to read it, but it is as reference-filled, just as long, and just as packed with meaning (as my friends who have read it tell me). Just because a book is dense doesn't make it obtuse or pretentious. Just because it's long doesn't mean the writer is overly verbose. Both of these are proved by this novel.

I just may go back and try to read Ulysses again. Well, after I finish The Crying of Lot 49 that is. Pynchon trumps Joyce these days.

Nobody can be truly supressed...

2007-10-10T22:04:00.000-05:00

...or so Murakami teaches us in "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" which is a wonderful romp through an "ordinary man's life". As I told my good friend 35 minutes ago, it is a haunted mystery tale on steroids with more than enough philosophy to fill books. This book is Murakami's Ulysses, filled with references every 5 minutes, all objects in place have meaning to the story (which is inconceivable from the first 300 pages), and the story-telling style is so interesting because I've now encountered it multiple times.

Boys and girls, the word for today is Epistolary.

An epistolary is essentially a collection of documents that tell a story. In my review for Pattern Recognition, I had commented on how much of the story is told in email and forum postings. Little did I know that this type of writing has a name. The book chosen for my book club, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, is another epistolary novel. Many books have taken this form, such as Flowers for Algernon, which is told through Charlie's journal entries, and Haunted which is told both through narrator observation and short stories and poems the characters write. In fact, the very first epistolary novel would have to be the Bible (duh... the Epistles of Paul?), or maybe a less controversial choice would be The Canterbury Tales. Wikipedia has a long yet incomplete list of contemporary epistolary novels.

Anyway, back to The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. This is a polylogic epistolary about an ordinary dude in a marriage who leaves his job and then a month later, his wife leaves him. He then spends the rest of the book looking for her and himself. That's all I'll tell you; I really want as many people(well adults; it is a bit X-rated at points, but to good purpose) to read this book as they can, for it really is a work of art. To make this point short, I really connected with the story and went through the emotions with this dude to the very end.

Okay, I promised my friend I'd be brief, so I am. :D

Daily Habits...

2007-09-24T21:00:00.001-05:00

are in fact a good thing. That's why I'm deciding to push myself into writing at least one thing every day. There was a post on one of the many blogs I read on a daily basis about a week ago that I can no longer find; maybe if I find it I'll post it. It spoke about giving yourself an interview, because sometimes the person you know the least is yourself. Well, I demonstrated this fact in two ways today.

The first was during yoga practice. Twice a week during my lunch break I go to a yoga class instead of my large lunch. It is a welcome interlude to the day and usually sets me on a good track to be more productive in the afternoons. Today our instructor taught us several mudras. A yoga mudra is a hand position that is used in breathing exercises or meditation. Let me first state that I am a practical yoga practicer, meaning that I don't believe in the spiritual side, but rather practice for the mental benefits of meditation and the physical benefits of the various positions. We were doing a meditation practice where several hand positions were held around the chest or waist, and by breathing one could feel the motion of the diaphragm. We entered one of the mudras where you make a double pointer shape with your hands (palms together, index and thumb extended, rest of fingers folded) and invert it, placing the thumbs at the bottom of the sternum and the index fingers against the bottom of the throat.

The moment I entered this position and started breathing, I started laughing. It was incredible, almost like a switch. I could hold the fingers half an inch away from the chest and be okay, but the moment I made contact with the chest I laughed. Honestly I was a little unnerved by it. Of course the yogi explained that it was possibly a freed energy center and that I was holding tension in that spot. Whatever. All I know is that my body has some funky wiring and when this mudra is performed I break out in laughter. I can still do it now.

The second thing I learned was while playing Big Brain Academy for the Wii. I rented the game through Gamefly to know if it was any good. It's interesting to say the least; the game has some rather challenging "brain puzzles" and although I doubt it's akin to an intelligence test, I can sense my brain straining (or at least flexing) when I play it. One of the puzzles is an art puzzle: there are two canvasses, one complete and one empty. The Wiimote pointer turns to a piece to be placed on the canvas to complete the picture. On the higher levels the picture flips. I am used to this: on a Playstation eye-toy game I once had, one of the games was to break small barriers in midair by coordinating your real-life movements with that on the screen, and every once in a while it'd flip the screen. Back to Big Brain, when you get to the highest level the canvas spins instead of flips. I can handle the flips just fine, but I can't get my head around the spins. I miss every one, almost like my mind has a mental block against solving it. Is it a form of dyslexia? I also had a similar problem with a counting puzzle where numbers rotated inside of balloons and I was confusing -68 as -89 and similar errors (which would be understandable if I hadn't missed it with the leading negative sign). The more I play that game the more I know my mental strengths and weaknesses. It's interesting to say the least.

Anywho, I'm out. Longer day tomorrow than today. But now that I'm dedicated to write about it, I'll start forming some new habits, and that's a good thing to shoot for.

Book Review: Only Revolutions

2007-09-23T11:42:00.000-05:00

I forced myself to finish this book, and was hoping for bigger and better things from Mark Z. Danielewski. Unfortunately, I was disappointed: half at myself for not understanding the story better, and half at Danielewski for not telling it better. For a book about dualism, I guess this is appropriate. So have an author fail this way is a depressing homage to all of the great experimental writers who failed in similar ways by concentrating on the form so hard that they eventually forgot they were telling a story first and writing it second.

Danielewski is a good author with big ideas and loves to toy with them. House of Leaves was a great book in this regard; his experimentation with colors, text placement, font choice, and manipulation of features like footnotes, bibliographies, and appendices are what made Leaves stand out. However, these "gimmicks" didn't make Leaves work. What made Leaves work as a book is that it told a coherent story with characters that we cared about, in situations that we could imagine in such a way that two people reading the same paragraph would render similar experiences, and these literary experiments worked to enhance this underlying story. House of Leaves was about a labyrinth, and the book taking this form is perfect for this story.

For exactly the same reasons that House of Leaves worked, Only Revolutions failed.

Once again, Danielewski is playing with form; this time, it's an epic poem told twice from the perspectives of Sam and Hailey. This dualistic poem concept isn't new: over 400 years ago John Milton wrote two poems about the same pastoral scene from two different perspectives: L'allegro and Il Pensoroso well before he wrote Paradise Lost. The beginning of Only Revolutions even speaks in similar couplet beat to these two poems. There is a ton of structure to the book: 360 pages arranged in 45 chapters of 8 pages each, each page has 180 words on it, 90 from each side, half right side up and half upside down. The stories are synchronized even for being 100 years apart, each page in the same section of the story as the alternate poem. A date appears on the both tops of each page indicating the date of that page for that narrator. The days decelerate for Sam who starts in 1863 and moves chronologically at a year/page until the end of his story when it moves at a day/page; Hailey's story starts on Nov. 22, 1963 (at the moment of JFK's assassination no less) and accelerates from a day/page to a year/page, ending in 2063. On the side of the poem are headlines from the day's events, and these also attempt to synchronize with the words of the poem alongside it. The first letter of each chapter also spells out "Sam and Hailey and Sam and Hailey and Sam and Hailey and" (also this is not new: Michael Ende started each of the 26 chapters of The Neverending Story with a consecutive letter of the alphabet, and Milton also used acrostics multiple times in Paradise Lost). Even the colors of the o's on each page match the eye color of the current narrator (extremely useful for remembering where you were). For a literary work, this book is an achievement in structure.

However, where this book succeeds in form it falls in substance. Sam and Hailey's story is virtually nonexistant, when and if you can pry it from the form that muddies the writing. Example of prose[sic]: "And allso their gyre's screw/Though I still tear loose of this crew./--Tootaloo girls!/ And Eighteen NewlyWeds wash pale while Double Dutching and buzzing YoYos:/--O hang on." Yes, Danielewski's using Carroll's word gyre correctly (meaning to spin like a screw). That's from Hailey's side; Sam's side is at first utterly incomprehensible until you compare with Hailey, a dictionary, and a lot of patience. Thankfully even Danielewski tires of this near the end, and the story makes a little more sense. Even with that, the events that peep out ramble more randomly than Allen Ginsburg. Multiple attacks from "THEM" (you think I'm kidding?) and "the Creep" add levels of allegory to suggest that Sam and Hailey are to represent the American Dream, always being sixteen and on the road. Now, don't get me wrong; I love allegory and satire, and when done correctly these methods of storytelling really push a point across. However, the allegory falls apart when it isn't hammered home. Imagine if Gulliver's Travels were told like this:
Samsarra Llemuel!
young sailor full of
life: --splayed on the ground in strife
TwoHundredThousand tiny threads of panic
and tiny voices of near static
Illusions of lilliputian eggs, and which side of budding wars
--Let go of me you whores!
I yearn to cross the See and be small
again.

Allegory makes sense if you really understand the story and the unmistakable opinions of the author. Swift really hammered home his message, and it was unmistakable his impressions of royalty, politics, and human folly, and even when he abstained from opinion it was clear that he did so. Danielewski's impressions of the American Dream are anyone's guess. Let's throw allegory aside for a moment: even if all he was looking for was just a love story (yeah right), even that falls apart. The prose to one another is more over-the-top than any harlequin romance, sex scenes are raunchy and one-dimensional, and jealousy doesn't even make sense when you can't tell if a character is flesh-and-blood or really just a concept (I swear I read that section about New Hope/Old Hope/Dying Hope a hundred times).

One might argue that I'm just too dumb to understand the story, and that if I were smarter and tried harder to read it I would love it. That's the problem though: if a story's only theme is that it is told in obscure kennings, arcane language, and indecipherable metaphor, it fails to become a story and transforms into some form of elitist test that only "proper" readers should be able to comprehend. I have no problem with flipping the book over every 8 pages, or appreciating the word count, acrostics, font re-sizings, or circular chronology. I loved it when e.e. cummings represented a cricket's movement with a spaced out word, or when Calvino gets all metaphysical when writing a book about reading a book about writing a book, or Ende's clever use of italics to flip narrator, main character, and reader's roles. And I loved it when I was crawling through columns of words in House of Leaves, because I had a reason for doing so. Unfortunately, Only Revolutions didn't give me a gripping enough reason to delve into the prose, and thus it fails, even in spite of the obvious brilliance of its author.

Pattern Recognition

2007-09-16T12:22:00.001-05:00

This is one of Gibson's most clever works, and really gave me an idea of what I love most about his writing, more than anything he wrote in his Neuromancer phase. Gibson is a crowd watcher, as evidenced by the arcade-game styling of his code jockeys in his cyberpunk phase (as research for Neuromancer, he went to arcades watching people play intently, losing awareness of the world around them), or like several stories in Burning Chrome having that Stranger in a Strange Land quality of someone watching an alien world unfold and eventually embrace them. People recognize Gibson as a cyberpunk author, but that really isn't his world anymore, as evidenced by his later works.

I'd venture to call this his post-punk phase, with books like The Difference Engine and the Virtual Light series (only read the first of these). This book is totally stand-alone (although I understand that some of the characters come into play in Spook Country), and tells an intriguing story that feels more present-day than futuristic.

I must be careful about this, because it was written in 2003, so what I call present was future for him. In fact I have a hard time calling this book science fiction, because it's not futuristic, just highly predictive and plausible. Such short term future novels would be easier to write from simple probabilistic argument (much easier to predict out a few unmentioned years than it is several decades like his earlier work). He schemes a book that feels cutting edge and slightly off of the timeline, and beacuse of this choice it gives the book a mystical sheen that makes it always feel ubermodern.

This isn't his only trick though; his characters make this novel work. Cayce Pollard is someone you feel no immediate recognition for and yet she draws an immense empathy. Her mother's a professed psychic, her missing father was a CIA agent/contractor, and from the two she draws many of her personality traits, akin to a mystic practicality that guides her through this "rabbit-hole" of stories.

Cayce is very sensitive to trademarks and in some ways commercialization in general. She makes a living working for companies trying to pick out new logos and to figure out what the latest underground styles are. Her allergic reaction to the Michelin trademark plays a role in several sections, and sometimes "Bibendum" seems to be her anti-avatar, being one of the most globally recognized trademarks. Plausibility of such an "allergy", psychological or otherwise, Gibson pans this character trait to expose globalization in all of Cayce's dealings, and seems to be his method of illustrating the evils of commercialism. It is a clever device; near the end of the book you end up cringing along with Cayce when said trademarks or popular fashion enter the frame of the story.

However, it's easy to see how Cayce's idiosyncrasies could have flattened her character if Gibson hadn't tried as hard as he did to flush her out. Her interaction with characters like Parkaboy, Boone, Damien, Dorothea, and Bigend bring out more of her personality than it does them. Much of the story is told in email and forum postings, a very interesting device to use for conversation. Email is looser of a medium than snailmail, but more thought out than IM or IRL conversations, and also has this weird intimacy that shouldn't be attributed to a protocol more akin to electronic postcards than it is sealed bank documents. Through this intimacy Cayce talks about her parents, her fears, her emotions in a way that makes us also understand her mental state better than the omniscient author could have ever spelled out.

In fact, email plays as a central plot point, when Cayce is writing more of a cathartic letter to a central character, not meaning to send it, and accidentally sends it. I can't think of the many times this has happened to me, and the dread and wonderment that it causes. It's all of these tiny actions and expressions that makes Gibson's characters less futuristic and more presently human.

Ack, writing more about this book would reveal plot that is better left discovered. Let it be said that this is a very striking novel, and although it may lose its sheen in a couple of decades it stands today as one of Gibson's most clever novels.

Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release

2007-09-16T11:51:00.000-05:00

My weekend was a bit of a one-note, although as shaped and designed as anything out of a synthesizer.

Roll back to Friday after work. We just packed up our section, as my team is moving from our spot to another one, which is kinda depressing; you become emotionally attached to any place you spend more than 40 hours a week at for more than 12 months, and I usually surpassed 40, and it was longer than 12. Same job, different surroundings. I left at 5, which was a break of sorts for me (usually only get out around 7 or 8).

I went home and got ready to run, leaving around 6. I only wanted to spend half an hour out running, but I got lost in several subdivisions, and when I reached the Merritt when I thought I was headed south, I knew I was kinda lost. I flagged down some people for directions, and didn't make it back until 7:30. At that point I debated the second part of my plan: to go to karaoke in New York. Having a lot of topics on my mind, I decided to clear my head and go.

There is an awesome little karaoke bar on 2nd Ave. between 43rd and 44th, called Keats. The staff there is really friendly, and the crowd is very laid back and enthusiastic. I had a wonderful time, not noticing the time until 3am. Whoops, trains back home stopped at 2. I decided to stay until they closed, and then find an all night diner (a great one is a few blocks north, around the 50s) to eat some breakfast and then get home. I made it home at 8am and then proceeded to crash for 8 hours, then eat and crash again.

I slept until 8 this morning. It was a total mind clear, and I feel much better because of it. Been cleaning the apartment, and then finishing a very clever book by Gibson called Pattern Recognition, which I'll review later on today. I may go running today as well, and this time in more recognizable territory.

I also plan to do some coding, making my sack lunch for tomorrow, and starting my next book, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Murakami. I have read several others of his books, including Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (my first), his book of short stories about the Kobe earthquake which was fascinating, and A Wild Sheep Chase (one of his most haunting). His recent stuff hasn't hit any chords like his older stuff, so I'm going after his "classics". I plan to finish this, Kafka on the Shore, and Norwegian Wood by the end of the year, as recommended by the group of people who read his books on Goodreads. He almost has a cult status on the net, but have never met people IRL who were big fans of his work. The only other person I know who has heard of him referred to him as a Japanese Stephen King, almost derisively, which is IMHO an unearned title. Murakami has a mastery of prose that puts King to shame, and his books bear the soul of a writer that intimately cares about his characters as if they were his children, faults and all recognized and forgiven.

LHIRT POD #4

2007-09-13T19:57:00.000-05:00

About time I wrote another of these. This one is not mine, and it's not particularly difficult, but I liked it because it elucidated in my own head some properties about roots:

Let x_i be the roots of the equation x⁵+2x+5=0. What is the sum of all x_i⁵, without jumping to Mathematica for the answer?

I have another one, but I'm tinkering with this new operation I've been looking at that is commutative, not associative, nilpotent, and has some cool closure properties, and wanted to first come up with a problem that uses that operator. I guess the proper term for this algebra is a nilpotent loop, and it has some really interesting math behind it (not to mention some intriguing open problems in that algebra and some sibling algebras).

Housekeeping

2007-09-13T19:00:00.001-05:00

So my habits of procrastination happen in spurts and droughts. Hence the two week absence. The cool thing is that I have friends that I can depend on to kick my tail in gear when I haven't been posting (thanks K!). That and karaoke both helped to unwind the soul and get me typing again.

K also asked me about the name of my blog. Viviomancy is a made up word (because the squiggly red line tells me so), that I forged from three word stems. Vivi- means lively and vivo- means life (which are not quite the same thing: robots and programs can be lively without being alive, and some living people can be downright despondent!), and if these two had a bastard child it'd be named vivio-. -mancy is a root meaning divination, which can mean fortune telling, but the definition I prefer is "successful conjecture by unusual insight or good luck". Joining these definitions together, I define viviomancy as the act of falling into a vibrant life through serendipity or action through non-traditional reasoning. I shouldn't say "happy" here: nobody can guarantee that through action. I only hope to make my life infinitely interesting and energetic.

Originally this was a blog about my new years resolutions, and for the most part I've kept up with aspiring towards some of them. I do read a lot more (especially without cable, see below). I exercise more, and hope that next year I'll get into another open water swim (too late to do one this year). Karaoke was an easy one on my list. My diet is much better since packing my lunch, and twice as good since May (a watershed month for many reasons). I have finally owned up to my finances, and am making headway towards being totally debt-free. My Japanese is getting better, but my Arabic hasn't yet taken off. I am procrastinating less (even with the lacuna of the last two weeks, this is the longest I've ever kept up this kind of website) and I do wake up in the morning to my alarm clock. However, I am missing some things: I haven't skydived, seen a shuttle launch (only a few more years left for that), am nowhere closer to getting a PHD and only minimally closer to getting that six pack. I like the fact that I have a long way yet to go and still have accomplished so much.

However, even with all those accomplishments, I realized that I was missing the point of having those goals: to make my life infinitely more interesting. This would take a lot more redefinition and focus, and a realization that happiness wasn't the target (because it's always fleeting). I had to focus on bringing up my energy, my creativity, my drive. I may not always be happy, but at least I'll be satisfiably intrigued (or intriguingly satisfied?), and that's success in my book. There's no sense in boredom, even if such ignorance is bliss.

So, what am I doing to become more vibrant? My first step was eliminating the things that dragged me down, either through their incessant grabbing of my fleeting attention with banality or through their monolithic representation of some obligation that I must complete (of which it also dares me to ignore). The highest on my list was TV. I am in fact cable-less; I gave it up entirely a couple of months ago, and it has done wonders for my soul. I do watch my two favorite shows on iTunes: Lost and South Park. The rest was easy to give up. I get my news off the net through Google Reader or by glancing at news sites like Digg or WSJ. I also get audio versions of New York Times and some sections of the New Yorker as podcasts, for my walk to and from work. I'll talk about more subtle robbers of attention in future posts.

I have a lot more to write, but I also have real housekeeping to do tonight, and some sleep to catch up on. I will post a smaller math post not connected to this one, and call it a night for now. I will be writing on subsequent days on how I'm working towards this larger, overarching goal.

Stupid clouds...

2007-08-28T03:58:00.000-05:00

have occluded the eclipse in Stamford this morning. It was a total eclipse too. Damn. And it was totally clear half an hour ago. I must remember to catch the next one on February 20 of next year.

Little hiatus...

2007-08-27T06:19:00.000-05:00

Last week was interesting and took some time to digest. I decided to wait until tonight to update. High on my list is the concept of capacitance applied to daily life, and that will probably be the topic for tonight. But for now, I'm off for my morning run to work. I came up with my new system to exercise and at the same time not have to deal with the sweat while walking to work. I now run to work, taking a longer route each week. Not only does it more easily allow me to extend my run, but also since there is a UBS gym across the street from work, it becomes very convenient.

On cleaning clothes...

2007-08-19T12:23:00.000-05:00

I was looking up what exact proportion of bleach I'm supposed to use on my whites, and I found this wonderful gem of a page detailing the ABC's of cleaning clothes. I'm sure there are more sites out there, but this one was pretty good. If only I had read this in college...

Nonrestricted link to the article about audiobooks,,,

2007-08-18T19:23:00.000-05:00

I just found a non-restricted copy of the audiobooks article Kristine pointed out to me on the NYT here: (Book clubs: Audio is copout). This is in reference to my blog post about this same topic here: (On audiobooks and book clubs). This way you can know what I'm talking about without paying the NYT extortion fee for the same words.

1211 stars...

2007-08-18T09:12:00.000-05:00

...and only 100 more puzzles to go. My theoretical maximum of stars is 1811. For those of you who are not in the know, this is the game I'm speaking of. I've been playing it for over a year now, off and on. It's the best investment of $20 I've ever made. I was also curious as to what happens when you solve all of the puzzles. It takes so long to do so, and in the process you must get really really good at Sudoku. The maximum number of stars one can get is 2030. I sure hope to hell you don't need 2000 stars to unlock something, I probably won't get that far.

Thomas Pynchon in Semaphore

2007-08-18T08:11:00.000-05:00

You have to see it to believe it: digital semaphore signals change every 8 seconds reading out the enigmatic text letter by letter. How could I make this up? Makes me want to go and read it, but not by semaphore of course. I'll leave that to Python and Wuthering Heights.

An early night is good for the heart...

2007-08-16T22:08:00.000-05:00

I just had a wonderful evening. My book club threw a barbeque in a nearby park and we had a great time. I got to do some grillin', we played bocce and chatted it up until 9 when it was too dark to see out. Hopefully Beth got some good pictures and I can post to that as a visual record. Also, Carley pointed me to this wonderful website called www.goodreads.com, and I just spent 2 hours detailing all the different books I read in the first 30 years of my life.

What was slightly jarring about the experience wasn't how easy it was to rattle some book names off, but rather the many books I've read and cannot remember the name of the book or the author. This really bothers me for some reason; it's as if I didn't read the book carefully enough. I guess it says something interesting about reading. You see, goodreads makes an interesting assumption: once you've read something, you'll never forget it and you'll always have the same opinion of it. Example, I remember reading Greenwitch by Susan Cooper, but I scarcely recall many of the elements of the book, and only because of the context of the book in the series (which I highly recommend). I also recall it as being the weakest of the books in the series, and now I feel bad about it because I remember it with this negative mark but with none of the details of why I disliked it so much.

I think the other thing that bothered me was that on the list I could mark off 129 books at first sitting, but at first sitting at netflix I could mark off 500 movies. I may have read at least another 100 books, and I have seen over 1000 movies. I guess if you multiply out the time dedication it evens out, but it's still a little disturbing. I'll have to read more.

I'm also looking forward to writing a lot more reviews, now that I have a list of books to refer to in order to review. After my games night tomorrow, I'll be reviewing quite a few. I think there was another website I was doing this with a while back, and I'll have to refer to that as well.

Work work work

2007-08-13T21:03:00.000-05:00

I did nothing but work today. It was draining, and I plan to sleep shortly... Maybe I'll write more in the morning, when my brain starts working again.

On audiobooks and book clubs...

2007-08-12T14:44:00.000-05:00

So this goes back to a bookclub meeting I attended back in late July (during my hiatus I believe, that period of time as gone as Europe in Darwinia). The assigned book was A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah (an excellent narrative btw, I may review it after Ender's Game). Since this was a first-person autobiographical narrative, I felt that the best way to take it in was by audiobook. This took some people in my group by surprise that I would do this, but after I explained my reasoning many agreed that I was in the right to do so. We had a great discussion about the book going on for many hours, and I was surprised at how many details I absorbed compared to the previous books I read for the group.

In general, I'm an auditory learner. I could hear mathematics from an early age, and although I could picture equations and graphs in later subjects, I often verbalized them before I visualized them. I didn't realize this until a much later age, and I wish I had realized this sooner. Actually, when I was first told this (I think while at the Academy) I denied it. Most mathematicians were visual learners, and being an auditory learner was considered a detriment to speed and accuracy. In fact IIRC out of the multitudes of mental calculators out there only two were auditory calculators (I believe both were Polish (my heritage), but cannot find a reference).

This prejudice carries over into the reading world, where in speed reading you are encouraged to avoid subvocalizing the word (i.e. reading aloud in your head), because the action of doing so causes nerve signals to be sent to the throat and back again, slowing the process down. In fact, they are right; when I skim articles for content because of this training I don't subvocalize at all, and it is very fast. But when I do this, I often read less carefully and can miss key points of what text I'm reading. When I read more slowly oftentimes I can imagine someone reading the text to me, or the book speaking to me as I read. This is just my habit, possibly spawned by my childhood experience.

My parents had a hard time getting me to read when growing up, mostly due to my stubbornness, but also my fascination with math. At 5 I could add two digit numbers on paper, but wouldn't read books without fighting. It was then that my parents did a cool thing; they got me audiobooks through Troll (Mom was a teacher so she got a discount through them). This is actually how I experienced the Hobbit for the first time; I remember spending hours upon hours listening to the story over and over. It is very endearing to me, more so than Lord of the Rings could ever be (which I read by book, slowly, methodically, and with much effort, even though I enjoyed it). Audiobooks are what finally got me into reading.

So I've never had an aversion to audiobooks or stories by audio. I often listen to Stephen Eley's Escape Pod for great stories every week, I subscribe to a ton of other podcasts, and I have several books on audio (one of which is still the Hobbit). I've even produced audiobooks for a school system before as part of my Eagle Project. So let's say I was more than a little shocked by the NYT (unfortunately now restricted) article Your Cheatin' Listenin' Ways. It amazes me in many ways how people could be so ignorant of the realities of audiobooks, and betrays some of the false reasons people attend book clubs. I'm glad that Kristine was equivalently shocked, and I'm about to provide my two cents worth. I won't be as caustic, but I also won't be as forgiving either.

First off, I'm not angry at the author of this piece, unlike Kristine who pointed this article to our group. He was simply pointing out the controversy, and it was good that he did. Personally, I wouldn't have picked up on it, and in a similar situation to Janice Raspin and Dane Frisby-Dart I would have defended the listener right there, probably to equivalent silence, or left the group if it was me who was being outed. It's a sign of a great book club that there is no derision in this regard. However, I don't think that the author of the piece has ever listened to audiobooks before. Some of the comparisons made by Mr. Newman were to the watching the movie attack, or to the privacy of being able to listen in the car, or anecdotes about the abridged version. These are comments that wouldn't come out of an audiobook listener.

Let's set in some of the real facts about audiobooks:

First off, no one who regularly listens to audiobooks wants the abridged version. This is similar to the sickening experience of picking up a book at a used bookstore and only finding out later that it was the Reader's Digest condensed version. If you've ever read both the abridged and unabridged version of anything, you understand completely what I mean. I cannot pick up an abridged version of anything and feel comfortable enjoying it; knowing that some other editor's sloppy hands has chopped the story from the version that the original author and editor had carefully assembled makes me feel cheated.

Second, it takes an equivalent or usually longer amount of time to listen to the unabridged version. This is because the average reading speed on an audiobook is usually much slower than the speed of your average reader. For a precise example, my unabridged audiobook of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is 17 hours for 480 pages, which takes 2 minutes 7 seconds on average to read a page. Usually when I read a book it take a minute per page. So by rough estimates, I'll read a book twice as fast as I can listen to it. Therefore, the arguments on saving time or effort to listen to the audiobook are misunderstood at best.

The argument on saving time is due to the perception that you can do other things while you listen to an audiobook, such as cleaning, grocery shopping, or walking. In fact I do listen to audiobooks or podcasts while doing each of these activities. But, the true number of actions that can be performed while listening to a podcast or audiobook are limited; only truly mindless activities are subject to being piggybacked by listening to the spoken word. The human mind is limited to the number of things it can concentrate on at any one time, and listening to something you've never heard before takes up a lot of that concentration. I would even question listening to audiobooks while driving anything but the most monotonous of trips. Your mind knows it too; have you ever turned down the radio when trying to find someplace you've never been before? That is because you know subconsciously that concentration is necessary for locating a new destination. Arguing that audiobooks require significantly less concentration than reading is as ridiculous as arguing that talking on a cellphone while driving is not dangerous.

Factor in the higher cost of an audiobook (usually 50% more than a hardback of the same book, even through iTunes), the longer amount of time spent listening to it, the amount of concentration needed, and the difficulty of finding unabridged versions, and you see that getting an audiobook for the same book is anything but "cheating".

I have a lot more to say on this subject, but it's late and I need some sleep. I'll return to it at some other time. I guess my point is that listening to an audiobook is just another way of experiencing the same book that requires similar effort than reading the book and results in similar, and sometimes increased comprehension, and shouldn't be treated so pejoratively. I have my theories why other book clubs are so against audio, but I'll save those for another post.

Sign of the times...

2007-08-12T13:57:00.000-05:00

As stated previously, I love the weekend.

On some weekends, I go on romps through New York or exploring Stamford. On others, I'll be recovering from whatever gathering or party I was at on Friday or Saturday night. One constant remains though: I always have a cleansing day. Sometimes it's Saturday before I go exploring. Sometimes it's Friday, so I can get ready for an energetic rest-of-the-weekend. Most of the time though, it is Sunday, like it was today. I did laundry, vacuumed, cleaned counters, changed linens, scoured the bathroom, and cleaned the kitchen. Later on tonight I figure out what I'll be eating throughout the week.

It's good to have this quiet time: reflective, meditative, restorative, and energizing. It took my ascendancy into adulthood to learn to appreciate this recuperative phase. In college, it was simply the time without class, and usually included either Wednesdays (on a MTRF schedule) or Tuesdays and Thursdays (on a MWF schedule) so being plentiful, it wasn't appreciated. And earlier than college, I didn't need to recuperate so it didn't matter. It takes the management of a life to really drill into you the importance of learning to survive the long haul. My sister is just starting to learn that now, and when she's my age, she'll finally understand where I'm coming from.

The weekend is a great time to play catchup, or sometimes to get ahead. Finishing The Left Hand of Darkness was a great illustration of catchup in action. I tend to read little bits at a time, and while this allows me to devour at least three to four books a month, some books move slowly because of their deep content. I had lingered on Leguin's book for exactly that reason, and was forced to sit on it for an evening to absorb it in depth. This evening will be an example of getting ahead, when I plan (and for some, make) the meals I'll be eating this week. Anything that can make the week a little less stressful works to my advantage.

Revisiting emails was also part of this catchup phase. Our book club is having a fun little barbecue at the Cove, and helping set that up was something that I couldn't get done with hell week last week. One email commented on an article in the New York Times about audiobooks and book clubs, which I will be commenting upon in my following post. Of course this email was two weeks ago. Reorganizing my Netflix and Gamefly queues was another task; both had grown weeds and some of my choices were painfully outdated. Getting my iTunes library cleaned up was another priority (I'm the kind of video/podcast/audiophile that had all 80GB taken up on the iPod and needs to manage the mix carefully for my moods). Thank fate that I don't have cable, else I'd get nothing done. :)

Things to look forward to in future posts: I have Crime and Punishment, The Corrections, and Darwinia as well as my book club book on the reading list, so expect reviews about these books in following posts. I'll be watching Metropolis and Alphaville tonight (part of the dystopia series :D) before I send them back to Netflix. I may be reviewing other books that I read during my 2 month hiatus (Ender's Game is high on that list). I am gearing up my Haskell skills to create my first game in the language, more details to come on that. I am finally gearing up my swimming, and preparing for longer distances again (2 miles at a shot is not hard for me now, and is a common practice), so I may post more about that. All of my social circles are preparing end of the summer parties so that ought to make for some interesting posts (my Thursday post might be especially entertaining). In all, there's a lot to look forward to.

A long rest, a muted recovery...

2007-08-11T21:03:00.000-05:00

Work was especially taxing these last few days. When I got home at 11 yesterday I had a couple of beers and crashed suddenly. Woke up at 3pm this afternoon. The rest of the day shot, I made the best of it and finished The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin. This is an amazing book, but my review will be most critical, and it follows.

The story is about an Envoy sent from a collection of planets attempting to make first contact with an unimaginably foreign civilization. The story is sometimes told from Genly's perspective and sometimes from his friend Estraven's perspective. The amazing part of this narrative is how Leguin is able to capture the culture shock between Genly and Estraven, and what it says about patriotism, jingoism, and xenophobia, similar concepts that by the end of the book are given sharp relief.

The story is told in 4 acts, but this is not evident at first glance, for the segments flow well from one to the next. This is both a benefit to the narrative and at the same time removes a clarity that is needed in as complex a story as this. I had a hard time reading this book; many times I had to stop reading and scan back to remember ideas of the culture, to catch details important to the story, or even to remember the first person speaker. This is in fact one of the worst features of the book; Leguin's quick change of first person without warning makes it extremely hard to follow unfolding events, and frustration at this tendency almost made me quit the book at several opportunities. I am very fortunate that I did not.

In several points Leguin breaks into Gethenian folk takes. This is not uncommon for science fiction about foreign or alien civilizations. What makes Darkness unique in this regard is the importance and timing; almost every single story is a foreshadowing or directly involves the plot. It is not as if they are thrown in for the sake of color; Leguin really wants you to understand what the motives of the characters are, and how influential the myths really are to Genly and Estraven. Not only does it add to the epic nature of the plot but also makes it understandable. It saves the book from incomprehension.

Another interesting plot point is the usage of foretelling. Early on in the book Genly meets up with a foreteller named Faxe. There are two different directions one can go in a precognitive narrative. One can allow the future to mutate (like a Back to the Future situation) or one could not permit the future to change (like in a Twelve Monkeys sense). Writers usually pick one side or the other, but will usually agree on the utility of being able to see the future. Leguin accepts the Twelve Monkey's perception of precognition, but doubts the usefulness of it. Faxe lets Genly know early on that his mission would be successful, but as Faxe says: "You don't see yet, Genry [sic], why we perfected and practice Foretelling? To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question."

Leguin hits upon many difficult philosophical questions in the narrative, which seems to small and complex to tackle them all. Admirably, she writes around what I would consider a crutch of storytelling in the late 1960s/early 1970s when this book was written, and that is the preoccupation with sex. Gethenians are neither male nor female, but rather permute their sex during a biorhythic breeding time called kemmer. If procreation is successful, the one who is female carries a child to term and stays in kemmer, but otherwise Gethenians return to a "neuter" gender. Many times in Darkness, Genly is pejoratively referred to as "the Pervert" because it appears that he is in permanent kemmer. I call this initially a crutch, because it was during the "Summer of Love" that too much attention was paid in science fiction to sex by the most prominent of authors. This obsession with countering the "obscenity" of sex would IMHO negatively influence stories such as Silverburg's The World Inside and Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, or even movie adaptations of earlier works such as Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, which had broader themes that were unnecessarily shortened by the preoccupation with sex.

Instead of focusing on the sexual act, Leguin handles this topic brilliantly; while the gender issue and prejudice against Genly for this is a main factor of the plot, she never features any sexual acts and instead of dealing with the attitudes about perverseness, she focuses on two deeper points about gender commonly overlooked: an alien concept of duality that emerges from a lack of permanent gender, and the differences in a society that is rid of gender roles. Without a permanent gender, any Gethenian can be deemed ahma, or the "parent in the flesh". This encourages a number of concessions made by the community for procreation, not to mention a manipulation of many concepts that become alien (or at least muted) in Gethenian eyes, such as rape (sex can only happen while in kemmer, and when both participants are willing), incest (which is permitted as long as it's intergenerational), and seduction (which is impossible to engineer if cycles aren't in sync, although this becomes a plot point in the middle of the story). One of the chapters of the book is written from the perspecive of a scouting mission to the planet that discusses this subject in detail.

In that chapter about sex, two really interesting subjects are elucidated. Because of the lack of gender, the race of planets that Genly comes from (the Ekumen) are almost convinced that the planet is an experiment, and Leguin slips in almost slyly

"But not that there is evidence that the Terran Colony was an experiment, the planting of one Hainish Normal group with its own proto-hominid autochthones, the possibility cannot be ignored."

Although she doesn't comment further on how Earth was an experiment, she does tie in "creation myths" to the story that try to connect in some diagonal way the Terran experience to the Gethenian one, as if the existence of creation myths indicate a pre-engineered society. Secondly, the purpose of this experiment was theorized to be about prevention of conflict. As is illustrated throughout Darkness, this is ultimately a failure; where there isn't full-scale conflict, the jingoism and xenophobia are highly prevalent, and cause many deaths and atrocities, while not paralleled to full scale war, are indicative of the times.

I would go so far as to say that Darkness was more influenced by the Cold War than it was by the Summer of Love. This would put me in conflict with many other reviewers, who consider Leguin's novel to be mainly about the Genderless Experiment. In fact there are numerous comments made in the third act of the book (Genly and Estraven's trek across the northern Arctic region) that speak to the dangers of jingoism. My favorite quote in this novel comes from Estraven (a Karhidian):

"Hate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? How does one hate a country or love one? ...I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks , I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name seases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing."

Leguin's main point is in this jingoism. The main purpose of Karhide's reluctance to submit to the Ekumen is the simple motive of it's national pride; by accepting their place among the collection of worlds they lose their dominance and importance on the world they inhabit. There are many discussions between the two main characters that separate jingoism (a warlike stance to assert one nation's superiority) from patriotism (a love of one's homeland). Genly comments about this near the end of the book:

As I ate, I remembered Estraven's comment of that, then I had asked him if he hated Orgoreyn; I remembered his voice last night, saying with all mildness, "I'd rather be in Karhide..." And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises: and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?

Politics plays center stage in the plot of this novel and Leguin shines in illustrating the subtle maneuvers performed by the (overly) numerous politicians in the book. The concept of shifgrethor plays a prominent role in Gethenian politics and is not completely explained. In one sense it is a level of honor between two people. In another, it is a mind-game of secrecy played in political dealings. In a third, it is a general sense of political power. This game that Leguin plays with the word shifgrethor is similar to Heinlein's trick of obscuring the meaning of the word grok. Unlike Stranger in a Strange Land, which places the concept of grok in the middle of a satire on American culture, Leguin's world makes use of shifgrethor in a more constructive fashion that adds more to the character development than the cultural and political argument the book makes.

In the same vein though, this also belies one major influence in the book that bothered me. It seems that Gethenian culture is borrowed (more than created) piecemeal from a mixture of Inuit and Japanese cultures. Many anecdotes are lifted from Japanese culture (or the American impression thereof) , from the mispronunciation of Ls (Genly is referred to many times in the book as Genry) to the concept of shifgrethor (which is very similar to the concept of giri, and similarly untranslatable). Leguin also refers to other Oriental concepts in the book, introducing the main Gethenian character to Go and the concept of the yin/yang. From the Inuit side, since Gethenian is a planet in the severe stages of an Ice Age, Leguin refers to the extreme survival tactics that are similar to Inuit experiences, creation myths that are very similar, facial and other physical features are disturbingly similar, and influences in language are plentiful (for example, there are multiple words for snow, snowstorms, and icy conditions). These cultural similarities could unfairly reflect on the cultures they're borrowed from if the overall perception of Gethenians were at all negative. Luckily it is not, but it seems a rather risky position to take. It could also be that these borrowed influences were unintentional, more from the research into different cultures than it was from stereotypical beliefs. This is my belief, but the overall impression cannot be ignored, and it did influence my perception of the novel just a little bit.

Overall, I do believe this novel to be a science fiction classic, and one that should be in the canon of anyone wanting to start reading this genre; however it does come with its problems. It is a very dense read, requiring concentration and slow reading, and may turn off potential readers in the first few chapters. Its very slow and suspense-less plot make it hard to become engrossed and involved in the story until at least the third act. Its Gibsonesque pseudovocabulary (like reading Neuromancer for the first time) makes comprehension frustrating. However, for the very same reasons this book shines. Its slow reading makes you think about the multitude of different topics presented, from dualism and patriotism to gender roles and cosmology. The characters are human, even for being alien, deeper that most science fiction novels permit. The diverse language of the Gethenians give life and inspiration to their culture. Finally, the book ends in Shakespearean fashion (the last chapter's name even quotes from the Bard), and forces you enigmatically to think about what just happened. The book is indescribably deep, which is both its worst failing and its strongest asset for this genre.

Wow... didn't intend to write a 2000 word essay... it just happened. I love the weekend.

Wow, 50th post...

2007-08-09T22:43:00.000-05:00

...but not enough energy to celebrate it. I just got back from work. I had an opportunity to see Don McLean but I was at work. I had an opportunity to croon some karaoke but I was at work. I could have spent today recovering and celebrating quietly, but I was at work.

Didn't realize how much of a dedication this job was until I had opportunities to weigh them against. Weird thing is, I still love it. It's finally nice to have an intellectually stimulating job once in my life.

Well gotta go to bed; I have to be in at 0630h tomorrow.

Random questions on a random day...

2007-08-07T22:07:00.000-05:00

The Mars Volta makes a great background for writing posts. That and some trivia with a little beer to loosen the thoughts. Work totally sucked so I'm releasing here. Did you know that Barney the dinosaur had yellow toenails???? I just learned that tonight. Our troop with the random name scored 70 against the leader's 76. Oh well; can't win them all with Kirk at the helm. I still can't believe I mixed up Jafar with Iago (think Disney).
Two women I met at the soirée last Friday (the one I crawled from) were at trivia tonight. One of them is really cute, the other one is kinda threatening. LOL and I'm 8 years older then both of them. Eriatarka is a GREAT song off of this album. There were only two Father/Son pairs for president, and only one pair was tolerable. What else did I learn? Harry Connick Jr. did the music for When Harry Met Sally. Foreman took the title in a fight called Bungle in the Jungle (at least it's not just a Jethro Tull song). Hitler killed himself on 4/20. Harry Karry announced for 57 years?!? Amazing. Also, John Carpenter (of Millionaire fame) lived in Connecticut.
That trivia night is too tough for one person, let alone a team. Take that last sentence as a full sentence or a fragment, whatever mood you are in. Tonight is made for stream of consciousness, and if fragments are good enough for Joyce, they're good enough for me!
Somewhere deep in my mind I am regretting that I will forget 5/6ths of the information that I tried to remember today. Hopefully the last 1/6th of knowledge will assist me in remaining happy. :D
Also, nights at the bar at the Sheraton (where they held the crossword tournament no less) just north of where I live are supposedly happening events. Who'da guessed???

Lead like the metal

2007-08-06T20:16:00.000-05:00

Today my mind drifts towards pseudonyms. I think of Fake Steve Jobs and have to laugh; this guy has mad a cottage industry pretending to be someone who is venting his "real feelings" after pretending to be nice all day. Soon he'll be selling a book off of this "realistic" pseudonym.
Most everyone picks some fake name to jump onto the net with. This is firstly due to the nature of usernames(no spaces, restricted length, and small space of available, intelligible, and suitable alternatives). As soon as people picked names that weren't anywhere near their birth name, etymology forced the username to handle. It isn't the first time; CB and Ham operators altered names for similar reasons (namely the restriction of their media of communication). But it was this world that really breathed life back into the false identity and gave it a life of its own.
I chose my internet name to be an anagram of my real one; I felt that my internet presence would mean nothing if not at least tenuously attached to my persona. It couldn't be too closely attached; on the net one needs a firewall around their soul just as much as they do around their network. This correlates to the real hypocrisy surrounding blogs. No one signs on with their real name and yet they pretend to bare their soul. One cannot bare their soul unless their soul is attached. Even my own persona is a conceit behind the firewall of my username.
One thing that was funny about my pseudonym is that when I came up with it it was unattached to the net, but rather part of a scavenger hunt I put together during my more creative years. So I always spoke it. Leadhyena Inrandomtan, Lead as in paint and gasoline. It wasn't until I got online that people expected it to be Lead, like the head of a group.
The funny part about this is that anyone who's seen any nature show about Hyenas know that they are matriarchal, so the lead hyena would be female. After realizing this, this would make most heterosexual males choose a new pseudonym. Oddly enough, even after this possible misperception was pointed out, I still stuck with the name. I had too much persona invested in it to just change it. It's too much a part of me now.
That being said, I've been referred to on the phone as Leadhyena before. Even with the right pronunciation, it still sounds weird to me. I can only imagine the feelings that FSJ must be feeling now. Will people start calling him Steve? Will it get to him a little? Or will he be rolling in the dough too quickly to notice? Something must hurt if one of your personas, no matter how fake, is exposed and summarily sold. In a perverse way it reminds me of the horcruxes of Voldemort.
That being said, I have signed on some sites with my real name. I have an alumni address and my work email has my real name. I also have a different persona for Second Life (Inrandomtan wasn't an acceptable last name, so I shuffled together Thornn-Adenine Maladay, but I rarely use it). Some pseudonyms are obviously jokes, like WTFOMGBBQ or therapistfinder (read it twice if you don't get it), and are used for sites like Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, and Fark. I'd feel really uncomfortable under one of these pseudonyms because this seems too sharp a quartering of the personality to represent sanely (then again you don't post on Digg most of the time for sanity's sake). The really strange one is where someone will pick an entirely different yet human name, like John Sanders getting online and becoming Bruce Smith. It really happens, and you have to wonder if these people aren't criminally motivated what their angle must be. In fact I find that I have much less trust in a real name on the net (unless it's in the news or famous in the coding community somehow) than I do in at least a mutated one like billy13579 or Chr1st0ph3r.
It's an odd business, this projection of our false selves. I wonder if the effects have been good on society overall. Too late to change it now anyway. Or is it? Many places are asking for email addresses as logins now (they need email verification anyway), and some places I'll use my alumni address and others I'll use my gmail one. Will that become our next "real" internet name, once biometrics are attached to the login as well? Who knows. It's a deep subject and sleep is making me more and more shallow.

---No fake personas (except FSJ) were exploited in the writing of this blog post---

Sunshine rocked! (or: why reviewers failed at logic)

2007-08-05T21:23:00.000-05:00

Another week another post... eventually I'll get around to posting daily. At this point I'm sufficiently happy with posting weekly. This past week was busy busy busy! I had a book club meeting on Tuesday (A long way gone by Ishmael Beah) which was really good and I was glad that there were other people who had doubts about the narrative as I did (I'll reserve that review for another post). Wednesday I had karaoke, Thursday was Alive at Five in Stamford, and Friday I went to an incredible house party in Fairfield with some friends I met in a trivia team (that incidentally I skipped on that Tuesday to go to the book club :D ). On Saturday I rested.

Today, I cleaned, mentally and physically. This past week had so much stress it was incredible, and my events in the evenings brought me through it but only to sustain not to refresh. So today I scrubbed laundry, sporadically picked up, sparkled dishes, swept floors. I slowly meditated. I swam for sixty minutes solid. Then I went to some movies: The Simpsons and Sunshine. It turned out to be an S themed Sunday after all.

I went to The Simpsons first, because according to the reviewers was a good movie (I was highly entertained; the Simpsons writing staff has not lost any of their wit). However, I only went because I was preparing myself.

You must understand that I really love sci-fi (I had gone through a phase of being bored with it, and am glad to be back into it again (thanks Stephen Eley), and wanted this movie to be epic, but I had read that Sunshine was only good for the first two thirds, and that the ending ruined the movie. Surprisingly enough this was repeated en masse by Wired (sorry: could only find a small snippet of a snub right now), New Scientist, SmartCine, and even Slate jumped in with two stories, one intelligent inquiry and one panned review. Almost everyone commented that the "Freddy Kreuger" ending was enough to kill the film. Even so, I undauntedly saw the film, thinking that being double featured with something funny would at least balance things out.

I was therefore shocked to see such an incredible film, and equally as shocked to see all these reviewers not get it at all! I was as mad for believing them as I was for them trying to ruin this film.

At this point I will spoil part of the movie. If you want to be surprised, then stop reading now and take my word for it. If you don't understand the ending, come back here. For those who need reassurance, read on:

The story is about a second attempt to save the sun by flying up to it and dropping a calculated nuclear explosion at the core to restart a chain reaction. I say second attempt because the first attempt never made it to its destination. They pick up the reading from the first ship and decide to board (because if they can grab the payload then they'd have two chances to succeed instead of one). Now at this point you must be thinking what happened to the first ship. It turns out that the first ship's captain was a Fundamentalist who believed that the sun was dying because of God and sabotaged the first mission. Then being smart, he waited for seven years with the replenishing oxygen garden. Why? Because he knew that mankind would make a second attempt and that if he put out a distress beacon with the ship mostly intact, he could lure them in and sabotage the second attempt as well and bring mankind down "as God intended". So he goes a little crazy near the end while waiting and overexposes his skin to the sun in the Observation Deck (where he murdered three other of the crew), and this makes him look like "Freddy Kreuger". Even though this was foreshadowed in the movie (the psychologist in the second mission has a sun-fetish spending lots of time in the observation deck which they did a great job portraying in his pocked makeup), overusing this effect led to the misunderstanding. I would have understand if none of this was spelled out.

But, here's the thing that really angers me. They DO spell all this out: the physicist and the second lieutenant figure out at the same time that it's the captain from the first mission and say this out loud. This "monster" is no ghost, is no "Freddy Kreuger", he's just a religious zealot thinking he's doing God's will to undermine both missions. I repeat, they SPELL this out in the film, and the reviewers still say it's an unexplained monster. This is almost egregious in its misrepresentation.

Besides, there are other unexplained things in the film that are more misunderstood than this monster thing should have been, such as:

the event horizon [the physics not the movie!] general relativity effects that wouldn't happen unless the sun were three times as massive
disregarding the "monster", the last three minutes of the film (you'll know when you see it)
why a sun would be dying in the first place without going through red giant stage [dying by fire first then by ice]
why they couldn't automate many of the mission tasks, such as the calculations to recalibrate the shield, repair the panels, calculate the new trajectory, and command the final shot of fissive material into the sun
why airtight isolation of oxygen from the damaged oxygen garden didn't automatically kill the fire, but rather that it would burn for 6 hours (how they solved it was a bit too convenient for too many plot points)

Personally I thought the religious sabotage was extremely clever in comparison to all of that (even though it's been done before too, like Contact). It just goes to show that even a thought provoking movie can be attacked by people who just didn't get it. It just goes to show that you can't trust reviewers all the time, and that your personal experience of a movie could be loads different than the well paid reviewers who may not watch the movie as faithfully. With all that said, I don't think that the ending was well executed, but it wasn't ruined or horrible. It's not a perfect movie, but it's damn near close. Please go see this movie before it leaves the big screen.

PS -- the next reviewer who compares a sci-fi movie to 2001 I will never read again. 2001 wasn't even that good compared to the book.

There, I'm done ranting now. :D

Okay so it's been two months...

2007-07-29T15:15:00.001-05:00

It's funny how some habits are easily broken. I went from writing every day to not writing at all, and trying to reform that habit. I also went from 8 cups of coffee to 0 cups back up to two cups (man caffeine headaches really do suck). I have been reading voraciously though. Some of the many books I've read in the last two months:

The time traveller's wife
Absurdistan
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows
After Dark (Murakami's latest novel)
Circuit of Heaven
Out (Natsuo Kirino's unbelievably dark crime novel)
Ender's Game

Other habit changes: I've canceled my cable, continued to swim through two sicknesses and a muscle injury, broke my eating habits, and became addicted to Meetup groups. It would be better if I could enumerate the continuum of these changes, but it's been two months and I don't remember all of it. I think my changes have been overall positive. There are failures, but I'm focusing on the good so that I can improve the good habits that are ailing and destroy the bad habits that thrive on my negativity.

Maybe I'll start writing more often as well. :)

So I cooked tonight!

2007-05-23T20:36:00.000-05:00

My next goal is to figure out how to post pictures here. I cooked a great meal tonight: lemon curry salmon, wild rice, and green beans. I will start recording my good meals, because I want to remember them. I think the secret to my perfect salmon was the marinade: curry, salt, pepper, olive oil, and lemon juice. Simple enough to be perfect.

POD #4 will appear tomorrow night. I am still researching the weird result behind POD #3: There are in fact counterexamples to p^q where p,q are prime. I don't exactly know the correct answer yet, and I will only progress when I have another question to post. I just want to keep the quality up.

Do any of you coders out there switch into vi mode whenever you start typing? I just did; every once in a while I'll want to alter a paragraph above me and start jamming ESC-kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk, wondering why in the hell the cursor is still in place. I remember a time when I hated vi with a passion. Now, I can't imagine writing code without at least gvim as an option.

Holy crap Lost just threw me for a loop. What a goddamned cliffhanger that was. But I still don't know where the polar bear came from, so I'm not completely satisfied. :) Night all.

Blogger keeps mucking up my posts...

2007-05-22T22:55:00.000-05:00

Ugh. When it comes to math blogging, Blogger totally sucks right now (until I learn some MathML). I always have some formula mutilated. Anywho, I am recovering from a trip to Tigin for trivia night on Tuesdays. I had a blast, joined a team, and had some fun. Met some cool dudes and some cute ladies too... It was totally fun, and will repeat next week. :)

LHIRT POD #3 Solution

2007-05-22T22:24:00.000-05:00

Here's the solution to LHIRT POD #3, again written white on white (highlight to read):

According to Catalan, _2NC_N = ∑_I _NC_I ². Since _N C ₀ = _N C _N = 1, there’s where our 2 comes from. It turns out that _N C _x where 1 < X < N. Therefore N C _I = 2 + ∑ ₁ _N C _I = 2 + (N * k) for some k. This means that the remainder will always be 2. As far as the converse, consider 343 as an example. ₆₈₆ C ₃₄₃ (mod 343) = 2, and yet 343=7 ³ and thus not prime.

One issue with this: I have yet to find a counterexample that isn’t in the form p^q where p and q are both prime. Interesting?

Cool problem huh? Anyone want to conjecture on that final form of the answer?

LHIRT POD #3

2007-05-20T22:58:00.000-05:00

It's time for a little number theory for the POD:

Let _nC_r be the number of ways to choose r items from n objects (or "n choose r"). Assume p is prime. Determine what the remainder of _2pC_p divided by p is, and prove it. For extra credit, is the converse true?

This one may be a little tough if you don't see it off the bat, so I'll leave it up for a while. Besides, I'm not entirely sure about the converse part myself. :)

LHIRT POD #2 solution

2007-05-18T06:00:00.000-05:00

Solution for POD #2 below (white on white below):

Let the point on the inner circle be T. Because PQ is perpendicular to OT, OTP is a right triangle. Therefore OP²=OT²+PT². Now, the true area of the doughnut is (π/2)(OP²-OT²)= (π/2)(OT²+PT²-OT²)=(π/2)(PQ/2)².

Amazing, huh? Of course the smart-ass answer is that because a formula must exist for this area based on the length of that tangent alone (or else the problem wouldn't have an answer). Since the radius of the inner circle does not matter, make it radius 0, and the area will stay the same or just the area of the remaining circle. In a non-authoritative setting this form of reasoning is invalid, because you can't be sure if the questioner is being honest in implying the existence of that formula.

Another problem will be posted tomorrow.

Ha ha

2007-05-18T05:43:00.000-05:00

It seems that I can't keep up with a daily puzzle, it is a lot of work and my schedule prevents it. I will be instead doing a couple of PODs (Problems of Difficulty :P) a week. This will also allow me to vary my posts more. There is too much in my life going on just to flood it with daily puzzles, no matter how much fun they are.

There's a lot of cleaning in my life recently. Recently I sold my PS2 and all games. I've vastly reduced my diet. My activities are paired down to affordable basics. My theory is that the less I'm invested in, the more invested I am in those activities. Maybe it'll pan out, maybe not, but it's something to try.

LHIRT's POD #2

2007-05-16T21:40:00.000-05:00

The problem derives itself from an old puzzle book that solves this problem in a very clever way. I am looking for the real solution, which isn't more difficult than the original method to solve it.

Take a pair of concentric circles, that share a center O. Take a point on the inner circle, and extend its tangent to its intersection with the outer circle at points P and Q. Given only the length of this chord PQ of the outer circle, calculate the area between the two concentric circles.

I will give both solutions in the morning, but I am looking for the one that does not assume that a formula exists in the first place.

Lack of acrimony...

2007-05-16T21:29:00.000-05:00

Acrimony is the word of the day, and what's remarkable is its absence; it's amazing that even after all the stuff I've burroughed through in the last few days, that I have nothing sarcastic or cynical to think. My breakup with Dawn is prolonged and melancholy, but not sharp or critical. We just mostly avoid each other as she remains here until she moves in with a friend. Her boxes are piling up, the lacuna of her stuff more striking than the stuff itself. I just removed her from my Wii. I think that both of us are more than ready to have this over as soon as possible, but that doesn't mean we wanted it to happen in the first place.

The important thing to learn from all of this is that you have to be careful with whom you choose to live. What remarkable relationship you have with someone will be cast in a much different light once you share living quarters with that person, and no matter how great your link is with someone, no matter how much you love them and they share that love, you must accept the fact that some people cannot live with one another, and to do so will create great and miserable sadness that the love itself can not overcome. One should ease into these things slowly, carefully, and mindfully, knowing that some things are meant to be and some aren't, no matter how truthful that knowledge is.

Now that I've cleared my mind about said issue, I will speak of it no longer.

Answer to POD #1

2007-05-15T22:02:00.000-05:00

The answer is in white on white below, highlight to verify your answer. Surprisingly this didn't take me much time, so I'll continue with my questions tomorrow. I will have to qualify by stating that I may pose a problem that I don't know the answer to, and may pass on the problem until I can research it further. This is all but an experimental exercise. :)
Here's how you figure out the expected number of complete rows: there are five possibilities to consider, because you can leave anywhere from 0 to 4 complete rows. You cannot leave 3 or 4 complete rows because of pigeonhole principle: 4 is impossible after removing one, and 3 is impossible after removing 4 (because you can remove an entire row and have one more to remove, destroying another row). So, in all C(12,4) possibilities there are 3 outcomes: leaving 0 rows, leaving 1 row, and leaving 2 rows.

Case 1: leaving 0 rows... you can do this by choosing 1 from each row, or 3*3*3*3 of 81 possibilities.

Case 2: leaving 2 rows... you can do this by first choosing the rows that are complete ( C(4,2) ) then finishing by choosing what to take within the rows that aren't complete ( C(6,4) ) leaving C(4,2)*C(6,4)=6*15=90 possibilities

Case 3: leaving 1 row. First, choose the complete row C(4,1) then choose which 4 of the 9 remaining to remove. But, be careful: of those C(9,4) you must exclude the ones that leave a full row which is [choose first the row remaining then the 4 from the 6 remaining, or C(3,1)*C(6,4)=3*15 or 45] so C(4,1)*(C(9,4)-45)=4*81=324.

To confirm: 81+90+324=495=11*5*9=12*11*10*9/4*3*2*1=C(12,4)

So, now that we have all the possibilities, let's calculate the expected value E=(81*0+90*1+324*2)/495=738/495=1.49090909... so the expected number of rows is about 1 1/2 rows. More likely than not, you'll have 1 complete row remaining.

I had a really fun time tonight, scoring 46 points in the brainmaster's competition at Tigin. I must look up this website; it sounds like a lot of fun. But, it makes for a long night, and your dear author is too tired to continue. Will write again tomorrow.

LHIRT's POD #1

2007-05-15T06:45:00.000-05:00

As promised, here is the first problem of the day. This one was brought to me by Kyle, my sister's friend's brother whom I met at my sister's graduation last week:

Take 12 pennies, arranged in a rectangle of 4 rows and 3 columns. Next, randomly remove 4 of those pennies. What is the expected number of complete rows that remain?

I will post the answer to this puzzle later tonight. I may ROT13 it so that I don't spoil it for any readers.

(PS -- LHIRT is the acronym of my pseudonym)

A problem a day

2007-05-15T06:38:00.000-05:00

I almost finished the book Flow, and the more I reread certain passages, I am just about convinced that Mihaly has found the essence of being happy. In my newly found solitude, I am in need of more challenge to prevent my descent into simplistic vices. I have thus decided to embark on my "problem of the day": a small logical/mathematical puzzle that I will post the solution for in the evening. I want to see how long I can keep it up.

Man, last week's Lost was utterly depressing, but now a lot of stuff makes a lot of sense. Can't wait for tomorrow's episode. That being said, I'm very close to giving up my normal cable service, and only having internet/phone connection. TV just sucks up too much psychic energy. More on this later.

New morning, long vacation

2007-05-14T05:20:00.000-05:00

I had a very interesting vacation with my sister for her graduation. I don't want to go back to work today; the pile of things to do is enormous. However, my mind is so clear right now that I couldn't feel more at peace. I am totally ready to jump back into the grind.

I decided to write up at least one math problem a day to keep my abilities sharp in between blog carnival posts. I had a time relearning all the steps to the proof of Burnside's Lemma. It's been way too long since my learning of group theory, and a lot of my math is rusty.

Indeed, a lot of things are rusty that I have neglected to keep up. Time to correct that. :)

Woo hoo I did it!

2007-05-10T11:15:00.000-05:00

I got my blog carnival post done, and it really was a lot of fun! I'm starting to realize that I've been doing a lot of things in my life that I don't make a point of appreciating or enjoying, and I mean to correct that. I'm currently in West Lafayette celebrating my sister's impending graduation and living it up. I am also almost finished with the book Flow, and it's amazing. My earlier posts on videogames are really coming into focus now. I really feel like I'm starting to enjoy living again, and what's even more surprising is that I don't feel guilty about it.

I wonder if I'm still drunk. :P

On Burnside's lemma and colorings of the cube

2007-05-10T10:53:00.000-05:00

I’d like to discuss counting for my carnival post. Counting seems to be a trivial problem: it is the first math lesson anyone gets, because it is at the heart of what numbers are and how they connect with the real world. Surprisingly, this most basic use of mathematics is the most subtle, and there’s a whole branch of math that discusses not only counting but also other discrete (non-continuous) topics called combinatorics.

There are two main difficulties to counting, when you break it down: 1) distinguishing between distinct elements of a collection of things, and 2) enumerating them. This may seem trivial, yet both steps are crucial. There are simple examples of objects that are countable yet notoriously hard to distinguish (the set of unique graphs with N vertices up to isomorphism), and sets that have distinguishable elements yet cannot be enumerated (the set of unique real numbers). Mathematicians have numerous (yet countable :P) tools to deal with these issues. This article will discuss one of the most powerful in the toolkit.

I’ve been inspired by an earlier carnival post where there was a rather lengthy discussion of the permutations of the Rubik’s Cube, in which it is stated that there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 states of the cube. What I find more interesting than this ginormous number is the smaller number 12. That’s the number of different ‘kinds’ of cube, of which only one of these is actually solvable (if you ever had someone bust a cube in order to scramble it, you know what I mean).

Any time you ask how many ‘kinds’ of object there are, you invoke of my favorite results of combinatorics: Burnside’s lemma. Instead of answering the question “How many objects do I have?” Burnside’s lemma allows us to answer the question “How many kinds of object do I have?” I’ll attempt to break down for you why this lemma is important as simply as possible, how it is used, and how ubiquitous it is. While I won’t tackle the number 12 in this article (we’ll need Polya for that), I will tackle another interesting question that has puzzled me since I saw a beginner’s cube with only two colors in a toy store in New York: how many ‘kinds’ of solvable cube are there?

Let’s start with some history, because even using the name Burnside’s lemma is controversial. William Burnside published this lemma and its proof in 1897, but the technique existed before Burnside; Cauchy and Frobenius independently discovered this method on their own. Some mathematicians call it the orbit-counting theorem or the lemma that isn’t Burnside’s (as opposed to the many lemmas that were; Burnside was rather prolific in group theory). I’ll still use the term Burnside’s lemma, because that’s how I learned it, and in fact it really is a lemma, not a theorem. Heck, it’s even a corollary.

The problem domain we will be discussing will be the counting of finite objects, so the focus will be on the first half of counting discussed above: Distinction. It is a difficult problem because of the fact that two objects can be distinct and yet counted as two elements of the same ‘kind’ of object. There are two ways to look at this. One way is to make piles of items such that any two objects in a given pile are similar, and then just count the number of piles (I know that the Ace and Queen of Spades are the same suit, because if I change the A to a Q it’s still a spade, so let’s put them in the same pile and count all the piles later). The other way is to count the number of ways a pair of objects can be different, and see how many of those kinds are represented in the object set ( I know there are thirteen ranks in a deck of cards by scanning the deck and counting the different ranks I see as I come along them).

It’s interesting that when discussing distinction, we get into equivalence. This is in fact the pure genius behind the lemma that proves Burnside’s lemma: equivalence creates both 1) A collection of distinct piles of elements in the set called a partition and 2) a collection of symmetries for each object that each object seems immune to. The technical way of expressing this is to say that in the actions of a finite group upon a set, there is something like a one-to-one mapping between the orbits and the stabilizers. It’s called the orbit-stabilizer theorem and will make more sense later.

Let’s explain the terminology. Start with a set of objects that we want to count and call it X (for example the set of all possible states of 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cubes). There are ways of changing one object in X into another object in X. These are actions, literally injective functions from X to X. If these actions are reversible (no blowing up the Cube, drawing on stickers, or taking a hammer to it), then these injective functions are actually bijective, and by Cayley’s theorem, each bijective (reversible) action is actually a permutation of the elements of X. Therefore the set of all actions on X constitutes a finite group with composition as its operator.

This is where you ask the question “What is meant by ‘kind of’?” . If you take the cube and turn it around, is it the same cube? This depends on the type of question you’re trying to answer. If a cube is the same no matter its orientation, we must consider that a rotation of the cube is really a symmetry of the cube. The set of all symmetries is a subgroup of the set of all actions, and definition of this subgroup is crucial to defining the question. At this point, two objects in X are considered the ‘same kind of object’ if there is an action in this symmetry subgroup that transforms one object into the other. As a mental exercise, verify that ‘same kind of object’ is actually an equivalence relation: you’ll find that the laws of a group line up nicely with the properties of equivalence relations.

Call this symmetry subgroup G. It is important to know the relationship between X and G: X is the set of objects placed under the influence of actions in G, or G acts upon the elements of X. Take an action g in G and an object x in X. The action g turns object x into another object called gx, and x is considered to be the same kind of object as gx. There are three important concepts in this model to consider:

1) Take the set of all objects that are equivalent to x. This is called the orbit of x or Gx. The family of all orbits is called X/G.

2) Take the set of all actions upon an object that don’t do anything to that particular object. This is the set of stabilizers of x or G_x.

3) Take the set of objects such that a given action doesn’t change that object. This is the fixed set of g or X^g.

How are these related? If two objects have the same orbit, then there has to be some action turning one object into the other, meaning they are considered equivalent. If you take the set of all actions and apply each one to the same object, it generates all the elements of that orbit. In fact if you squint at this a little bit, you can imagine seeing that orbit of x, being driven from object to object in its tight circle by the whims of the actions of G. We discussed orbits before when talking about distinction. In fact, this partitioning of X into orbits is the disjoint family X/G, and the size of this family is the answer to our question.

So how do we count orbits? Recall that there are two points to distinguishing objects. Here’s the cool part: that stabilizer of that x whose orbit we were looking at? It’s a kernel of this mapping of G onto x, and the moment I say kernel, you should immediately be thinking of the quotient group formed by it. By calculating that quotient group G/G_x suddenly we have a collection of cosets. Each of these cosets is a collection of actions that will always translate x to a y and always that same y in that same orbit. This G/G_x becomes a way of saying that the elements of this orbit are different in the same way, and they match up one-to-one. This bijective mapping is the orbit-stabilizer theorem and it’s the lemma to Burnside’s lemma, because instead of counting the orbits, we can count the stabilizers instead and use the bijective mapping to get our answer.

So how do we count the stabilizers? Let’s look at the third concept above. Fixed sets are a really useful thing to look at: it’s relatively easy to count the size of a fixed set, because you’re looking at one symmetry at a time, and analyzing the effect of that symmetry. So how are fixed sets related to stabilizers? Well, fixed sets are to actions what stabilizers are to objects. If we made a big chart with actions g going down the left side, objects x written across the top, and a check mark everywhere gx=x, you could see that each row of checkmarks represents the fixed set of that action, and each column of check marks represents the stabilizer for that object. They’re two different ways of counting the same set of checkmarks:

∑_gX^g={(g,x) gx=x} = ∑_xG_x

Now we are getting somewhere. Instead of counting the stabilizers we’re counting the sum of the sizes of all the stabilizers. What’s the size of a stabilizer? This is where that orbit-stabilizer theorem comes in. Remember that the stabilizer is a kernel of that big mapping that finds orbits, and that the cosets of that kernel are representatives of each element in the orbit. Now use Lagrange’s theorem: the number of cosets times the size of any one coset (they’re all the same size) is the size of the group. The number of cosets is just the size of the order (by orbit-stabilizer theorem), so divide:

∑_gX^g={(g,x) gx=x} = ∑_xG_x=∑_xG/G_x

Pull G out of the summation, because it’s a constant. But now it looks like we’re adding up a bunch of fractions, the sum of the inverses of the size of each orbit. How is that supposed to be a whole number? Remember that if two objects are similar, they are part of the same orbit. Moreover, no two orbits can intersect. Why? Because if x in one orbit intersected with z in another orbit, there would be an object y in both orbits such that gx=y and hy=z thus (h*g)x=z and h*g would prove that x and z are in the same orbit. As discussed above, orbits partition the object space into distinct piles. So if there are 5 elements in an orbit, then that orbit will be counted 5 times for 1/5 each time, and volia we’re back to 1. So, this summation is really the count of the number of orbits or X/G, the very number we’re looking for:

∑_gX^g={(g,x) gx=x} = ∑_xG_x=∑_xG/G_x
=GX/G

Divide by G on both sides and we have Burnside’s lemma in the flesh:

X/G=(1/G)∑X_g

Or: The number of distinct orbits (read kinds of object) is equal to the average size of the fixed sets.

Now that we know why it’s true, how do we use it? A simple example should help here: say you have a strip of 5 red and green squares in a row. How many kinds of strips are there? Start with X: There are 5 choices of red or green or 25=32 different strips. But that over-counts: RGRGG and GGRGR are actually the same strip, just one is the other flipped over. The action to factor over is “flipping over the strip.”. Therefore the two actions in our symmetry group are e, which is leaving the strip alone, and f, which flips the strip over. By Burnside’s lemma:

X/G=(1/2)*(G_e+G_f)

G_e is the easier one to calculate: since nothing happens, everything is fixed by it, therefore 32. G_f is fixed if the first and fifth squares match, and the second and fourth squares match. Choosing the first, second, and third squares are sufficient to choose the pattern, so there are 23 or 8 such patterns. Therefore there are (1/2)(32+8) or 20 different patterns.

Burnside’s lemma gives us a striking derivation of the Mississippi formula, counting the number of permutations of a set of symbols with duplicates. The formula is P=(n!)/∏(r_i), where n is the number of symbols overall and r_i is the number of duplicates of symbol i. From the perspective of group theory, let X be all the different permutations of those symbols with duplicates numbered. There are X! of those permutations, and they are the objects. Let a_i,P be the action of rotating the duplicate i symbols using permutation P. For each symbol i there are r_i! permutations, and the action group is the direct product of those permutation subgroups, a group with ∏r_i! actions. Now, here’s the trick: only the identity action will fix any objects and there are n! of them. Therefore X/G=(1/G)∑X_g=(1/∏r_i)(n!+0+0+0+0+…)=n!/∏r_i!. Many times when using Burnside’s lemma, you have to set up the object set in such a way that the division by the action set is clean, like in the example above. When you do this, a lot of the problem’s contours come into sharp relief. In the example above, by numbering the duplicates, you first reduce the problem in a way that makes it easier to divide by the duplicates later.

By now you recognize the pattern in solving a “how many kinds of” Burnside’s lemma type of question:

1) Determine the population of your object set X

2) Calculate the permutations present in the symmetry you wish to factor out

3) Calculate all X_g for each permutation

4) Divide by the size of the action group to calculate the number of orbits

Now with Burnside’s lemma in grasp, we’ll tackle the question we started with… how many solvable cubes could they sell? First we know that there could be at most 6 colors (any more than that and one side would have to have two colors, violating solvability). Let’s assume that manufacturers will only retool the machines they already have, so that they can only produce the six colors on a normal cube, or red, yellow, blue, white, green and orange. Let’s label the sides 1-6. Then there are 6⁶ or 46656 different combinations of the cube. This is the population of our object set X.

Next, we calculate the actions on the faces of a cube. The easy way to count this is that any automorphism in R³ is a rotation around some axis, a flip across some plane, or a combination of the two. The nice thing for us is that we don’t have to worry about the flipping part, unless some of the audience is 4-dimensional. Therefore, it’s sufficient to analyze rotations. Furthermore, this line has to pass through the center of the cube. This limits us to three kinds of points that the rotation can happen: through a corner, the midpoint of an edge, or the centroid of a face. There are 3 pairs of faces that rotate three ways, 6 pairs of edges that rotate one way, and 4 pairs of corners that rotate two ways. That and the identity rotation are our (1+3*3+6*1+4*2)=24 rotations.

That’s still a lot of rotations. To simplify the rotation, we can group the rotations based upon their actions on the faces. For example the face rotation (1234) will do a similar action as the similar face action (1536) even though they are technically different rotations. When rearranged, we have 5 types of rotation: the identity, a 90-degree face rotation (abcd), a 180-degree face rotation(ac)(bd), an edge rotation(ab)(cd)(ef), and a corner rotation (abc)(def). Each cycle fixes to a single color, which makes this representation very fortunate.
Now we are ready to calculate the X_g. The identity obviously has 66 (everything fixes with the identity). The 90-face will only have 3 colors because the 4-cycle can only have one color so 6³. The 180 face has 4 cycles (2 2-cycles and 2 fixed points) so 6⁴. By similar logic the corner rotation has 6² and edge rotation has 6³. We now have all the pieces to calculate X/G:

X/G=(1/G)∑(X_g)=(1/24)( 6⁶+6*6³+3*6⁴+8*6²+6*6³)=2224.

So, let’s say that we want to figure out the answer for 7 colors instead of 6. Do we have to do all that work again? Nope. The only time 6 colors was used was in calculating the size of the fix points, and it was always raised to a constant power. We could have just as easily calculated for 2,9, or even k colors. For k colors the number of cubes is (1/24)( k⁶+6k³+3k⁴+8k²+6k³), and if you see enough of these you can recognize a particular symmetry by this formula. The special name for this form is called a cycle index.

Which brings me to my final question... why is Burnside’s lemma a lemma? A lemma is a step in a proof that leads to another result but isn’t really significant in its own right. The reason is because of these cycle indices. Polya took the idea of a cycle index a lot further by recognizing something rather brilliant: the cycle index is really a generating function for the counts of each of the rotations! By separating the cycles out instead of multiplying them all together, automating the process of producing the index, and coming up with a way to throw a weight function into the generating function, the Polya Enumeration Theorem was born which allows us to count more complicated symmetries and represent them in a much more elegant fashion. This is really what Burnside’s lemma is a lemma to, and it will be the topic of my next carnival post.

1050 stars...

2007-05-06T12:37:00.000-05:00

Nothing special happens at 1000 stars. That's cool; I'm in the process of solving every puzzle, so I can get a time at the end of the game. That in and of itself will be satisfying. I'll let you know the total when it's available.

Yikes, last week really sucked. Major production problems, financial issues, and personal issues collided on the same week. Therefore, yesterday I became a weather vane and went into New York with no plan and it was everything I hoped it'd be.

Today I plan to write an article for the Carnival of Mathematics. I am following the lead of a post on The Happiness Project talking about tips to increase self esteem. I haven't written about math in a long time and I should come back to that.

Watching Lost...

2007-04-25T21:39:00.000-05:00

...and still amazed at how it still surprises me. That and South Park are the only TV I watch anymore. It's evidence of fate that these two shows are on at the exact same time. Thank god for Tivo and the fact that South Park was a rerun.

I'm reading Flow by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi. It's an eye-opener, and talking about an experience of self that happens when I code, or write in a flush, or swim for an hour non-stop. It's amazing the amount of research that went into that book. I also have Chi Running on queue, and may start it at the same time.

I read an interesting post on The Simple Dollar. This guy claims to read 4 books a week. I'd be happy with two, especially if I get better comprehension out of it. However, one thing that rang true through the article was how much time I've been wasting. If he has enough time to dedicate at least 8 hours a week reading, I can at least dedicate as much to read 2 books at my own relaxing pace. It's at least better than wasting time with my console collection.

915 stars

2007-04-15T21:27:00.000-05:00

I'm really close to the 1000 mark. Just finished Survival of the Sickest... a most intriguing book. I'll write a review tomorrow, along with the movie M, which I just rewatched tonight. More tomorrow.

777 stars...

2007-04-02T05:31:00.000-05:00

and still climbing. If you're wondering which game, it's called Sudoku Gridmaster for the DS. I wouldn't recommend it; I just happen to like Sudoku a whole lot. I probably will get sick of all things Sudoku when I beat everything in this game. Part of the reason I'm playing through every puzzle is that I can only find cheat pages (really just unlockables) for this game. I cannot find a proper FAQ anywhere. I know there isn't that much to say about Sudoku (puzzle solving tips, perhaps), but no one seems to say what happens when you either a) get 1000 stars or b) solve every puzzle. I know solving every puzzle will do one thing: after solving the Platinum test (in 2:55 now, I'm getting embarrassingly good at it) it adds up your times for every puzzle and displays that time or 999h59m59s otherwise. Any unsolved puzzle is scored at 99h59m59s, so you won't see any difference unless you solve all but 9 puzzles at least. There are 193 puzzles remaining. One puzzle a day will take me until October 12th, and I'll probably finish before that, since I've owned the game less than 6 months and solved 211 puzzles in it which averages to >1 puzzle a day. Enough geekdom; getting ready for work.

Taxes and other boring tasks...

2007-04-01T21:53:00.000-05:00

Did my taxes... thank god for automated tax programs. It saved me a lot of trouble, and a C-note to boot. I got a lot of stuff done this weekend: filing, cleaning, laundry, reading, and I got 766 stars on my Sudoku game. I then went to type my blog entry, and it started going really sour. I completely wiped it out and wrote what I have here. I now understand what Sarah was saying (Sarah's my sister, and quite probably the only other reader of this blog). I tend to only feel like writing down my thoughts when I'm down, to get things off my chest. What I didn't realize was that these negative thoughts reinforce when I'm typing like that and saving it to be reread in the future. I need to stay more postive. But first I need good sleep. :)

Really, 766 stars. That's at least 153 puzzles each in under 10 minutes at normal difficulty. I'm getting really good at the sudoku. Some of the harder puzzles take about 25-30 minutes, but never longer than that. I remember when the easy ones were taking that long. Maybe you can make yourself smarter with this thing. Or maybe I'm just teaching myself the test again. It does wonders for the ego though. :P

Refreshed...

2007-03-26T20:10:00.000-05:00

Today was a fun day, even with its length. A lot got accomplished at work; that always feels good. Also, Dawn took me out to eat after work today, a place called Myrna's on the east side of Stamford. I always groove with these smaller shops; usually the owner is there to wait on you, and is very nice to boot. Dawn always picks out the best Mediterranean restaurants, and it was a perfect choice. I even yielded my coffee fast today to have a little Lebanese coffee, which is similar to Turkish but "brighter".
Anywho, other cool things about today:
1) Feel a lot more awake without coffee than I usually do. I guess that's what anxiety will do for you. ;) I'm trying to reduce to cold turkey, but I'll be smart this time and go slowly. This way I can enjoy the buzz when I need it, and only then.
2) The new Modest Mouse is great: Florida is one of the best MM songs I've heard in a long long time. Even as I had left Florida, far enough, far enough wasn't far enough. Unbelievably brilliant. I felt that way about Texas as I was leaving it. I may send a copy of the album to Adam, he's still in Florida. Poor dude.
3) Expert systems are really hard to put together. Mine is coming together very slowly. I'm using it to start coding up some example Wumpus problems, and then use it to solve Nurikabe puzzles.
4) Almost finished with Survival of the Sickest. What a strange book; it is the first time I've seen the use of evolution as a route to prognosis and diagnosis.
5) I am at 714 stars in my DS Sudoku game. Soon I will be at 1000 stars and will have no reason to play Sudoku ever again. Yeah, right. :) At least I can say I'm good at it. I can solve the Easy puzzles in 3 minutes now.
6) I will sleep well tonight.
It's about damned time I start thinking positively.

Exhausted

2007-03-22T21:20:00.000-05:00

I have not been this tired in my entire career. This was one of the most exhausting weeks I've been through. I am so ready to just crash this weekend.

Disconnected...

2007-03-19T20:28:00.000-05:00

I had no idea how tired I was at 1am writing my blog entry. I didn't get enough sleep and am rectifying that tonight. More to write tomorrow. It's amazing how a lack of sleep can make you feel more disconnected than you do in your dreams.

www.allconsuming.net is addictive

2007-03-18T22:19:00.000-05:00

I spent the last 5 hours adding books that I have read to www.allconsuming.net. Scary. Some would feel squeamish about telling everyone what they like, but since Amazon already knows my purchasing habits, it might as well be in an accessible form.

I really can't call it addictive, considering my last long post. I don't think it was a waste of time, because other people who meet me will read over my lists and get an idea of the kind of reader I am. Okay, so it was a little bit of a waste of time, or maybe I don't know. I've really been concerned with the time wasting nature of most videogames nowadays. Are they addictive? From my last post I have to consider the possibility. Dawn is playing Sims 2 right now. She's been playing it all day, after I upgraded her machine last night. Tomorrow she'll break down, telling me that she regrets spending all that time playing that game. This won't alter her decision; she's told me all this before. I've gone on gaming purges in the past, and they rarely last. I was going to go on one recently, and Dawn stopped me. I got a Wii recently, and realized what I really wanted from gaming was something more physically and mentally challenging, or maybe I'm just coming up with more excuses to continue my habit.

Some of my gaming is good for my brain. I have Sudoku on my cell, my iPod, my DS, and in books. I do play it on breaks or before I go to bed or if I'm in line waiting. I find it mentally stimulating, and studies have shown that playing games can stave off mental decay. However, I don't condone long game-playing sessions, especially if they get in the way of living. Odd that I say that, since I have a PS2, a Wii, a DS, and my computer which has lots of games on it. I think the answer lies in moderation.

Now, only if I can develop that habit.

A story about "Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)"

2007-03-18T21:58:00.001-05:00

Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)

by Neal Stephenson

I first read this book last year (2006) as an audiobook. It felt like a book written recently. I was so impressed at the foresight that this book exhibited, which is amazing considering that this book was the most fun I’ve ever had with a sci-fi book.

See more about Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)

A story about "Welcome to the Monkey House"

2007-03-18T21:32:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the Monkey House

by Kurt Vonnegut

This is without a doubt one of the best collection of short stories I have ever read. Period.

See more about Welcome to the Monkey House

A story about "Light"

2007-03-18T21:12:00.001-05:00

Light

by M. John Harrison

This book is phenomenal, and I intend to read it again in about a month. It really stretches your mind on how a sci-fi book should be written. It really extends beyond current science fiction, further in scope than Dune, written in a fractured form similar to Hard-Boiled Wonderland, and oddly enough it makes you feel happy at the end. My only complaint is that the book is a little too sexual, and in the end it will turn off some readers.

See more about Light

A story about "State of the Art"

2007-03-18T20:38:00.001-05:00

State of the Art

by Iain Banks

I guess that it’s worth it. It’s one of the strangest series of stories that I’ve read in a while. I read this book because of The Wasp Factory. Totally different type of fiction. I am very impressed that both books could come out of the same author, and I plan to read Complicity really soon. If you don’t like science fiction you WON’T like this book, but don’t avoid this author, because his writing is amazing. Definitely check out The Wasp Factory if you get the chance, and check this book out if you like sci-fi.

See more about State of the Art

New habits...

2007-03-18T07:44:00.000-05:00

Dawn introduced me to Covey's 7 Habits book, and I was looking carefully at the Venn diagram on Habits last night during my reading session. There are the three main circles of Skill, Desire, and Knowledge, and of course Habits was in the middle. Mathematicians draw these diagrams to contemplate what happens in each of the 7 regions, which leaves all of the two-without-one regions. Oddly, it made sense to label these three regions with negative monikers:

Skill^Knowledge^~Desire=Procrastination
Knowledge^Desire^~Skill=Ignorance
Desire^Skill^~Knowledge=Addiction

This makes total sense to me. If you know why and how to do something, but don't want to do it, that's a natural definition of procrastination. If you know why to do something and you want to do it, but you don't know how, this is ignorance. If you want to do something you know how to do, but aren't sure that you should be doing it (or are willfully ignoring the consequences), this suggests addictive behavior.

Some questions naturally occur with this line of inquiry. If you don't know why you are doing something, is this the same as willfully ignoring the reason? I would suggest yes. You should have a moral reason to do the things you do. If reasons to possess a certain behavior are proven wrong later, you have a reason to change your behavior, and not taking this action shows dependence on the behavior. Does the broaden the range of addiction? Sure it does; even people who take vitamins after the suggested benefits are disproved are showing an addiction to the habitual action (and possible placebo effects of) that behavior. Isn't there a fine line between procrastination and ignorance? I would suggest that the perfection effect (being paralyzed by inability to perfect the task you're attempting) is a struggle between procrastination and ignorance, and is really just using ignorance to cover for your procrastination. This is indicated by the ease in which ignorance is cured (by research) as opposed to procrastination (where said research turns into aimless wandering).

Finally, after looking at these negative conditions, doesn't the Venn diagram seem kinda lopsided? It could be an effect of the internet; the increasing ease in which ignorance is curable allows for the other parts of the diagram to dominate. Something to think about.

Finished edits...

2007-03-17T23:58:00.000-05:00

Well I cleaned some stuff up and got the Twitter feed... now if I remember to update it all the time, it'll be good. Also got a lot of other stuff done today. It was mainly sponsored by the hard drive crash on my old machine. Now my new laptop is hooked up to my flatscreen, and I can do a lot of stuff at once now. Also did the dreaded iTunes transfer. Wasn't nearly as painful as I thought it would be. In fact it was totally seamless, save for a couple of crashes because iTunes wanted to convert my .wma files and Windows totally didn't want that to happen. :)
Also got my butt in gear and transferred my files into GTD format. I'm now in the system. All I need to do now is get a good task manager program together. If I don't write my own, I'll use something else. It'll have to be stored online; I can't tolerate being tied down to a single machine. This is part of the reason I played around with Twitter. I only wish I could consolidate all of this information in one place. Hmmm... this could be an interesting development project. I'll have to crack open my Java books. Could be a lot of fun.

Playing with Twitter...

2007-03-17T23:33:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately I got sucked in. :P All good. It'll be a quick way to update where I am from anywhere. I'm adding the badge as I type... we'll see how well it works.

Totally unrelated note...

2007-03-08T23:13:00.000-05:00

I totally missed out on karaoke yesterday! The IT group at work went in my stead, and I guess they had a totally awesome time. Ugh. I guess there's always next week.

Random thoughts day...

2007-03-08T22:42:00.000-05:00

In honor of the book Freakonomics, that great economics text that had no central point other than to express how economists think, here are a few random thoughts out of my own head.

My neck hurts.
I didn't start feeling better from my sickness until I went out with friends and threw back a couple of beers. Try to explain that Levitt!
It's hard to be creative on a daily basis.
I drink a whole lot of caffeine.
Tomorrow is Ride the Fire Eagle Danger Day. Thanks to Zefrank for posting an awesome video podcast!
My neck still hurts, probably from the way I type lying down in front of my lappy. I'm sure that Stephen and Steven have some statistics on that relating it to the Edo Period and literary development. To prevent them from writing another paper, I decided to sit up.
Microsoft's mistrust campaign with iTunes worked. Apple claims that it is compatible, but because I'm fighting the urge to struggle against it, my iTunes library still sits on my older XP machine.
I really love coding in Haskell. I hate reading Perl written by a coder who uses it as a fancy scripting language.
I LIKE the name Worse Than Failure! Even so, I still like the reaction from coworker's faces when they see my WTF mug at work. :D
For that matter, SELECT should be renamed GIMMIE. It seems that anyone asking me to use SELECT in my code is begging like a little child for something.
Right now I think that the two Stephens should write an article about Open Source.
I am now laying back down due to laziness.
I know that I can come up with twenty of these.
Doesn't Guinness give me hangovers? Isn't that what they say about dark beers?
It's really flipping cold outside. Just thinking about it made me fart.
I'm finally accepting the fact that I'll be living under my own power for the rest of my life.
Fashion sense is a total mystery to me. So is South Park, but at least I enjoy that. Crap, I missed Lost last night. At least I have a DVR.
I want to throw out half of all I own. Or at least give it away. I'm such a cluttered person, and I sure that the two Stephens would correlate that to my obesity.
Kohina means white noise in some Scandinavian language.
There is something cool about the glow of a black screen in a dark room.

There. I feel less creatively constipated now. Time to sleep.

Productively sick...

2007-03-07T01:09:00.000-05:00

I've gotten over this unproductively sick mode I was in the last couple of days. I may still put off my karaoke for Thursday night, but oh well. I realized a few things today:

Accept that you are sick and that you need at least some rest.
Rearrange your living space when you are sick. This will make your body assume a different mindset and encourage healing. This includes being able to access necessary items from bed, such as water, food, communication.
If not completely bedridden or in the process of recovery, clean thoroughly. You don't want any lingering germs to make you sick again. This will also make you feel better.
Take off more time than your sickness. Make sure you are feeling okay before returning to work.

On other accounts: I wish I'd take my own advice more often. :) More in the morning.

Surprised there aren't more people...

2007-03-05T23:17:00.001-05:00

...who are interested in doing karaoke??? It’s a blast and a great excuse to get drunk if you don’t mind making an ass of yourself, as well as a great excuse to make an ass of yourself if you’re planning on getting drunk. :) Seriously, we all need to blow off steam once in a while, and this is one way to do it.
In fact I plan to do some more on Wednesday.

See more progress on: do more karaoke

Never liked being sick...

2007-03-05T22:27:00.000-05:00

Man, when you're trying your hardest to become re-motivated it pains you to be sick. Essentially all this forward motion you've been gathering has been dealt this impassible snowstorm, and you are forced to stand your ground. But, you shouldn't ruminate. You should march forward. So what if I can't exercise right now? I can sleep better, and that is one of my goals , or at least a derivation thereof.
Haven't listened to Kohina in a while, and I missed it. They have a bunch more tracks, and I just heard this most amazing track, Solomatic Fly by Orcan, which just took me a long time to get to play again. Thank god for emulators! Anywho... I must get some sleep, will write more in the morning.

Books I've read in the last two months...

2007-02-27T23:22:00.001-05:00

Funny that this is one of the only resolutions that I’m doing really well about keeping. I’ve read the most amazing books in the last 2 months, including:
Getting Things Done—David Allen
This book is required reading for anyone who works a white-collar job. I can’t imagine getting organized and productive anymore without his guidance.
Mind Hacks, Mind Performance Hacks—Ron Hale-Evans
These two amazing books help explain the workings of the brain. An extremely interesting thing to read while also reading GTD.
The Road—Cormac McCarthy
This is the most prolific book of our time. Hands down. As depressing as the book was, I will end up rereading it at least two more times before I understand the two main characters in detail. I am more like the man but strive to be more like the boy. This thought scared me more than the landscape.
The World Inside—Robert Silverberg
Another dystopian novel, not nearly as prolific, but interesting in its own way. I only wish that you didn’t have to write a sexually shocking book in order to get published in the 70s, the free-love movement unfortunately vomiting over culture. The urbmon concept is really interesting though, and I do agree with the hypothesis that humans will evolve to mold into the constraints of their environment, be it biological, social, or political.
Also on audiobook I’m finishing Altered Carbok by Richard K. Morgan (thanking fate for Audible and iPods). Talk about dystopia. I still really don’t know what to think of the whole concept of sleeving.
I can say that I have accomplished restarting my reading bug again for the following reasons:
1. The only TV I watch anymore is whatever I can get from my iPod, South Park, or Lost. I’ve gone down from 20 hr/wk to 4.
2. I have 4 books on my plate now: The Illuminatus Trilogy (enjoyable reread), Them (interesting nonfiction about conspiracy theories), Freakonomics (wonderful way to learn economics), and David Allen’s sequel Ready For Anything.
3. I see no stop to reading in my foreseeable future.

See more progress on: Read more

David Allen knows...

2007-02-27T22:57:00.001-05:00

I just finished reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. This is a very important book for anyone wanting to understand why you should get organized. I didn’t realize how much I was wasting by not doing so. It’s interesting that the book is about productivity and yet this is the first thing I thought to comment upon after reading it. Take it as a sign and check the book out; there are some really good hints there.

See more progress on: organize

Small thanks

2007-02-27T22:37:00.000-05:00

Lately I've found myself doing a curious thing with my mail at work. I will label each email that has a thank you that is in whole or in part directed at me, and label it "gratuity". I then reread these emails at the end of the week, via an automatic Outlook search folder. This allows me to do two things:

It allows me to reflect on the good that I did during the week. Many times at work I may get the incorrect impression that I'm not doing a good enough job, or that I'm doing thankless tasks. This allows me to remember that I'm not.
It also lets me know who is most thankful of my work, and this is the person who has the best impression of me, implying that this person is one I don't ever want to let down.

Does this seem simple or trite? It's not to me; even if the person is saying thank you in an offhand manner, it still conveys some level of gratitude. It also reminds me to respond in kind. I used to be "that guy", the one who wouldn't send thank-you cards. I now understand the importance of them, because even though I do so in a methodical manner (as methodical as my lazy-ass can become) I now realize that all people do the same thing, just more commonly on a more subconscious level.
-----
I am typing this on my new laptop (thanks Mom and Dad!) and am now realizing that because of the small keyboard I end up typing across on my border letters again. I once broke that habit by only using split keyboards. Unfortunately I have redeveloped this habit. I can't complain too much though; the laptop kicks too much ass for me to begrudge it. :)
So, here's to breaking old habits, and hopefully forming new ones. Time for me to write a thank-you letter to my parents. They'll think that I've gone off my meds.

As promised...

2007-01-11T21:28:00.000-05:00

Here are those links I collected today:

Someone once said that if you were to make a list of your 10 closest friends and acquaintances and order your earnings and theirs from smallest to greatest, you'd probably find yourself somewhere near the middle. All that this means is that we are subtly influenced by our friends, even when we're not aware of it, especially in matters of money. Being somewhere in the middle is probably more comfortable for the average person.
Top 25 Personal Finance Myths - www.yourcreditadvisor.com/...

Those who do have profiles view them infrequently, if at all, once the account is created and the initial enthusiasm fades. Barely a fifth are accessed "several" times while just 26 per cent are used once a day by their owner.

In further findings, Pew debunks the myth teens are leaving themselves open to predatory adults by making too much personal information available online. Sixty six percent have ensured their profile is protected and cannot be openly viewed.

Bubble bursts on Web 2.0 site membership claims | The Register

And if the Higgs is lighter than physicists thought, then we might not have to wait for the Large Hadron Collider, a brand new, massive particle smasher, to come online at CERN, the European particle physics lab. The LHC is scheduled to start smacking stuff into each other this year. Instead, the folks who run the Tevatron, the big collider at Fermilab in Illinois, might be able to nab the Higgs first.

Wired Science - blog.wired.com/...

British scientists are preparing to launch trials of a radical new way to fight cancer, which kills tumours by infecting them with viruses like the common cold.

Common cold virus may be new weapon to fight cancer | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited - www.guardian.co.uk/...

Last fall, he put his revolutionary polemic into action with Manifesto Games, a site where you can buy and download computer games that, like Gibbage (shown at left), are too lo-res, too niche, or just too damn weird for retail shelves.

Wired 15.01: PLAY - www.wired.com/...

As you can see, FileMenu Tools rolls several simple utilities we've posted about before into one nice package. Add to that the ability to create your own custom commands (your imagination is the limit, really), and this freeware, Windows-only tool looks pretty good. — Adam Pash

Download of the Day: FileMenu Tools (Windows) - Lifehacker - www.lifehacker.com/...

According to Eric Thompson of AccessData, a typical password consists of a root plus an appendage. A root isn't necessarily a dictionary word, but it's something pronounceable. An appendage is either a suffix (90 percent of the time) or a prefix (10 percent of the time).

So the first attack PRTK performs is to test a dictionary of about 1,000 common passwords, things like "letmein," "password," "123456" and so on. Then it tests them each with about 100 common suffix appendages: "1," "4u," "69," "abc," "!" and so on. Believe it or not, it recovers about 24 percent of all passwords with these 100,000 combinations.

Note created January 11, 2007Schneier on Security: Choosing Secure Passwords - www.schneier.com/...

Like Dustin mentioned in his latest post, Origami Experience™ is the newer, cooler, more functional version of the Program Launcher. Not only can you quickly open your programs, files, folders, or websites, but now you can now easily access your media content. Last but not least, we’ve listened to your feedback, and integrated all of the configuration tools directly into the application. No more extra applets to manage!

Team Blog : Origami Experience™ Feature Screenshots - origamiproject.com/...

I can write essay after essay about the inefficacy of security cameras. I can talk about trade-offs, and the better ways to spend the money. I can cite statistics and experts and whatever I want. But -- used correctly -- stories like this one will do more to move public opinion than anything I can do.

Note created January 11, 2007Schneier on Security: Surveillance Cameras Catch a Cold-Blooded Killer - www.schneier.com/...

Know that box of sad, unmarried, AC adaptors you've got lying around? Tim Matheson's quickie video video tutorial shows you how to hack 'em to power low voltage electronics.

Hack Your AC Adaptors To Power Low Voltage Electronics - Consumerist - www.consumerist.com/...

Workrave is a program that assists in the recovery and prevention of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). The program frequently alerts you to take micro-pauses, rest breaks and restricts you to your daily limit.

Workrave - www.workrave.org/...

GTD is a great time management practice. There are many great applications out there to organize your tasks and your life using GTD. But when it comes to Outlook, a very popular application which manages mail, time and contacts, a user has only the option of plugins designed for GTD. Let’s face it. We all are reluctant to leave our favorite application and use another one just to manage tasks. And then? Another application for emails, another one for tasks? It can be really confusing.That’s why I developed Jello.Dashboard. It’s just a homepage for Outlook, easy to install and use and totally free.

Jello « Jello.Dashboard - jello.wordpress.com

A stranger called Abbas. He knew where he lived in Manhattan, in the upper West 100's. He knew Abbas had a fireplace in his bedroom. Abass's apartment was not for rent, but the caller saw an ad on Craigslist saying it was. Abbas did not place this ad.

Blogger Finds Own Apartment Listed On Craigslist - Consumerist - www.consumerist.com/...

And thus ended that experiment. That took some extra special parsing with Vim... I only thought of the easier way as I was finishing this post, which is pulling the HTML from the print version of the notebook instead of the functional one. I will also post my editing commands to remove all of the notebook functional crap shortly.

Hard to hold onto resolutions...

2007-01-11T21:14:00.000-05:00

Haha, so much for updating every day. I'm lucky to get every other day.

However, I did make progress. I got into Wesabe, which is an interesting form of free Quicken for the web. It is rather slick, and has already spotted issues with my spending habits. I need to review all of my subscription services and clarify if I need them or not. Thank you again Lifehacker.

I've also really optimized my method of using Google Notebook. I now have the browser extension that lets me insert notes into a right click. I will be appending some insightful quotes into a links-tagged posting on an occasional basis. I do read a whole lot of news sites between coding jobs and this tool really makes it easy to recall all that I found interesting or relevant.

This weekend will be dedicated to organizing papers. I have a whole stack, and with taxes looming, it'd be a good time to start preparing.

Spam sucks...

2007-01-09T06:32:00.000-05:00

I have two accounts, one of which (unfortunately my main one) is impossible to use due to the daily choking of spam. I get about 250 spam messages on it a day. No joke. The filters do catch 90% of it, but that still leaves 25 a day to clean out manually. I think I'll make it one of my goals this year to keep my email down to 0 each day.

Anywho, good morning. I'm slowly adjusting my schedule (goal #19) waking up earlier and earlier each day (today it was 0609h). One day I'll be at the goal time of 0500h, which will let me exercise in the mornings, meditate, and do my brain exercises all without losing my schedule. I think that I'll also work on posting twice a day, once at the beginning of each day, and once at the end. It'll help to bracket my day a little bit. At the very least recording my waking time in the morning will let me keep track of my progress.

Speaking of progress tracking, while 43things is a great tool for making resolutions, it's not so good at tracking progress. I may have to create a tool for this, because there doesn't seem to be a good one out there to record this kind of general progress. For now, I'll keep the info in an XML, just to parse it later. One of my biggest problems though is that I don't like to record failure. That'll be a psychological hurdle for me to surpass.

At least I'm not feeling nearly as groggy as I was yesterday. That's an improvement.

New day new post...

2007-01-07T12:57:00.000-05:00

I love sundays.

I was able to finish a whole bottle of sake last night and play some Okami. I played until 0200h, when my fatigue kicked in and I zonked. The place is much more organized, as Dawn and I have built some organizers, then scoured the bathroom and the kitchen. This place is almost livable.

I got to play only after Dawn finished with Final Fantasy X, which she hasn't played through. I'm starting to believe that pursuing the current generation game machines aren't all it's cracked up to be; it's just as entertaining to play the older games, and there are a lot that I haven't played. Besides, with all my dedications (see list on right), I only have one night to really get into anything game-related, and that's Saturday night.

Anyway, I played out the perfect morning. Woke up late, ate breakfast first thing, cleaned up thoroughly, did my meditations, reading, and brain exercises (Brain Age, Konductra, Sudoku), and am writing in my blog. I obviously can't do this every day, so I have to compromise for workdays, but this feels pretty damned good. I also have to figure out how in the heck I'll fit in exercise. This wasn't a problem a couple months ago, but since I've fallen off of the wagon so to speak it's been a bit more difficult to get motivated in the morning. I'll have to come up with some sort of a schedule, then figure out how long it'll take me and retime my sleep schedule accordingly. I'm also going to figure out how to lighten my nighttime activity, so that getting to bed at 9-10pm isn't so difficult (this'll make getting up at 5 to have enough time to get going in the morning easier).

Also, I installed MSys and MinGW yesterday. I was having trouble with the wxHaskell toolchain under GHC6.6, and I figured I'd build from the ground up. I haven't coded C++ in a long time and now is as good a time as any to refresh my skills. If you haven't learned any Haskell, it's a fascinating language. It is the model functional language now, and can do a lot of stuff with very elegant code. It does take a lot of rewiring though.

I have about 4 or 5 different coding projects I do want to commence upon. I have a Swing coding project involving a new IDE system, which I've thought about for several years now but have done nothing towards. I also want to build my own brain training regime, based off of my reading and some other ideas that I've had about the subject. That, along with a new organizer program that I want to build in Haskell, and a new card game that I've placed in a Google Notebook called TaxiCab which is a variant of the Japanese series of card games involving Hanafuda cards called Koikoi (two things to note here: I discovered this fascinating variation of games from Clubhouse Games, and also learned at the same time that this is how Nintendo got its start as a company). Anyway, enough of that tangent. Needless to say I have a lot of coding work to do. I believe my track for today will be to get my papers organized, then vacuum, mop the kitchen (the one thing we didn't do yesterday), and then code for the rest of the afternoon, taking a break to come up with a daily plan for the next week.

So much for keeping up on things....

2007-01-06T10:05:00.000-05:00

Well that was an enduring week. I work in the financial sector, and the culture there encourages many extra man-hours. This 3 day week I put in only 40. At the very least they gave us more vacation, woo-hoo! I do love my job, but the culture can foster burnout if you're not prepared to balance your life. Anywho, that explains the hiatus. That and my laziness. :)

As far as my goal progress... I added more this week, yet they didn't hit me hard because I don't look at my goals on a daily basis. I'll need to build an applet for that. I already have it hooked into my Google page (using this) and that helps me remember at work. I also use the Google notebooks on my main page to record stuff regarding my goals while I'm at work so I remember to bring it home. I have started to read more, and I will be adding a link to my page that will let you know what I'm currently reading and maybe some blog posts about it as well. One of my goals this year is not only to read more but also to digest more of what I read instead of letting it flow in one eye and out the other. I am reading the MindHacks book right now, and although it's not a real hacks book per se, it teaches you about the brain and all that it is capable of. This book and the Lifehacker blog are part of the reason I wanted to start this blog in the first place. I wanted to record my progress on my resolutions, as well as the applications of life hacks on my own life, hence the term Viviomancy (not in dictionary, vivi = living, mancy = divination or presumption, aka attempting to predict the effects of hacks on my own life and analyzing my efforts). Besides, the term just sounds cool.

I'm also going to start another Mark Haddon book (I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time last year and loved it). How I came upon this book is rather interesting. I lend my stuff all the time, and am really patient about it. I have lost things because of this, but I don't care. You lend something to somebody when you don't use it anymore and you think that they'd benefit from it. Whether or not you get it back is moot because my rule is that I only lend out one thing at a time to a given person, meaning they could benefit more if they returned items. That being said, things do happen. I lent my copy of Curious Incident to a friend at work. She read the book but was in the process of moving and misplaced it. These things happen; she was so upset about it though, that not only did she buy me a new copy of the book but bought me another book by the same author. This kind of karmic action is really moving, and she totally earned points in my book from it. Funny enough, when she gave me the book I'm starting this weekend (A Spot of Bother) , her husband found Curious Incident in his nightstand. It seems that the book is spreading, which makes me happy.

Anyway, I'm adding another resolution to my list; I will update on a daily basis. This way I keep up on my items, review them and maybe make progress on them.

Linked Up...

2006-12-28T23:08:00.000-05:00

Well that was a tangent... I have now added myself to 43things as well as 43people, installed Picasa/Hello, and also cleaned up some settings... I should have fun configuring this over the weekend since I'm not going to Times Square to see the ball drop. Besides I want to do some reading tonight, and I have to get up early tomorrow so that I can exercise in the morning. Hopefully by starting on my resolutions early this year, I'll be able to get the inertia rolling. I wonder if I can hook my traineo account into this blog as well...

43things...

2006-12-28T18:50:00.000-05:00

I'm on a lifehacking kick... so I created this blog to track my progress on this tack. I also have a problem keeping up with any form of documentation or chronicling, and one of my resolutions is to work against this inability to record. Now I'm off to join 43things and join it to this blog...
--Leadhyena