Guido has posted a summary/status update on Python 3000. So many nifty things to look forward to!
So much good stuff... Python's metaprogramming capabilities just keep growing. I wonder how of this will be backported to 2.6.
- Seek Private Instruction
- Make a Schedule
- Set Goals
- Concentrate
- Relax - Practice Slowly
- Practice Hard Parts Longer
- Play With Expression
- Learn From Your Mistakes
- Don't Show Off
- Think For Yourself
- Be Optimistic
- Look For Connections
(from Wynton Marsalis)
Wow, this thing is way out of date. First of all, I added some photos for our Alaska trip, although I'm nowhere near done with processing all the RAW images I took.
I'm currently working on getting some Chaco stuff refactored and ready for PyCon 2007, which is approaching all too rapidly. Robert recently did all the hard work of getting an OS X backend put together for Kiva, so Chaco now runs natively on my Macbook. Fonts are still not quite right, but fonts suck and we all knew that. The elimination of font-matching code is one of the primary arguments for telepathy, in my mind.
I was curious to see what Mohammed actually looked like, and found a nice image archive of Mohammed.
Someone should make these into bumper stickers.
The problem with blogs is that you have to write them. I wish my blog would just fill up with irreverent witticisms so people would think I'm cool. But alas, there isn't such a thing as a blog ghostwriter.
Or is there?
Google tells us that I'm not the first to ponder this idea: link1 link2 (Wow, someone thought of this in 2004... I'm way out of date!)
Anyway, so last month I went to PyCon in Dallas. This past weekend we moved our horses from Cadence Ranch in Liberty Hill, TX to Rocking B in Pflugerville (or is it Manor?). And right now I'm working hard on (re-)implementing Chaco.
The sound of the erhu is the physical manifestation of sorrow. Even when it is upbeat and joyful, there is an unmistakable undertone of muted sadness.
I just had a realization about why "conspiracy theories" are never taken seriously. It's because they are not actually "theories", but are rather merely hypotheses to explain events that have already happened. No "conspiracy theory" explanation I have ever seen has any predictive power whatsoever, and thus it can only remain in the realm of the hypothetical. If any of the various "conspiracy hypotheses" regarding JFK, the moon landing, 9/11, and so on could actually predict things that are going to happen or evidence we have yet to uncover, then they would be elevated into "theory".
Most people are too cavalier in their use of the term "theory". I hypothesize that this is due to the poor level of science knowledge in this country, and due to the fact that hypothesis is in that rarified strata of the American lexicon known as "the four syllable words".
The "Intelligent Design" movement stems from the Creationists' fundamental misunderstanding of what science is about. They perceive science as a mechanism for getting "answers", and not liking the answers that science has given so far, they propose their own.
*But science is not at all about getting an "answer"; it is about rejecting all the non-answers.* In fact, the underlying premise of all scientific endeavour is that there never is The One True Answer. This is the point that the Creationists have missed; this is why Intelligent Design is a non-starter. They'd like to frame the "controversy" as one between Scientific Truth and (insert euphemism for "biblical") Truth, but in doing so, they've already placed themselves outside the realm of science, because *there is no such thing as Scientific Truth*. There is only Scientific Explanation-That-Is-Least-Nonsensical-Right-Now. Because "Intelligent Design" is not an explanation, it is not in the realm of science.
Furthermore, the whole "science vs. non-science" issue aside, Intelligent Design is still flawed on its own merits. It argues, "Right now we can't figure out how life originated, so... it *must* have been the result of the conscious act of a single, "intelligent" entity." (Note that the "intelligence" of the "designer" is entirely gratuitous; perhaps it was a remedial God that created our world, and the all the smarter Gods made better ones whose inhabitants aren't so oblivious to reality.) The structure of the argument, though, is essentially: "We don't know [X], so we posit [Y], without proof or any method of verification."
So, rather than "Intelligent Design", I propse we call it "Stipulated Ignorance". Why can't we apply this to any other field? Consider Stipulated Ignorant Arithmetic: "We can't compute pi to 100 trillion digits, so we assert its value is "GOD". (The children and their parents are free to decide for themselves what "GOD" is, but undoubtedly, there is a "GOD".)"
In the context of social interactions, a person's level of control over himself is analogous to mass or momentum in a physics context. The more self-control a person has, the less someone else can exert their power over him; the more self-control a person has, the more they influence those around them. Ultimately, all power and all control are just extensions of self-control. This is something people intuitively know, but few think of it in those terms.
A person's level of self-control is derived from self-respect. Since all true respect comes from knowledge (though sometimes fear is mistaken for respect), a person's self-respect is derived from self-knowledge.
This is not an intellectual, factual sort of knowledge, although psychology and neuroscience can certainly shed light on some things. Self-knowledge is an understanding of both how you feel, and why you feel that way. Greater self-knowledge extends to understand why you think the thoughts you're thinking.
Since no language can express the full richness of a human being's experiences, and since knowledge of a person's experience is crucial to achieving knowledge of that individual, understanding oneself is a journey that each person must undertake on their own.
This is why Krishnamurti said, "Truth is a pathless land." Whether you make that journey in a vehicle of established religion, or whether you take every step and misstep your own, the ultimate aims are always the same: understanding the self.
Any spiritual or religious doctrine that is orthogonal or runs counter to this goal is merely an exercise in control.
Just a random assortment of things I need to look at/into:
UltraCorps, an online web-based multiplayer game by Steve Jackson
Munchkin and Frag, two card games by Steve Jackson
Dork Tower, an online comic
Something Positive, another online comic
Game Puzzles, an online store/resource for cool games
Loompanics Unlimited, "hard to find, controversial, unusual books"
Genetic Omni-dominance, the God Hypothesis
I was wondering today if anyone has set up a Fakenet, that is, a closed set of sites that inter-link and create the illusion of legitimacy. If you think about it, the way we deem some site or page to be real or legit is similar to Google's Pagerank. We check out the sites that link to it, and we google for it or its owner, etc.
The most immediate use of a fakenet that comes to mind is to build a new style of fiction. That is, if you convince people that a certain blog or personal web site was real (by embedding sufficiently large numbers of links to convincing but fictional sources), you could construct an entire fictional narrative and character but people would sympathize much more strongly because of the perceived reality of the characters's existence.
I was thinking on my commute into work this morning: For a given population or group of people, there must be a curve showing how much more likely they are to purchase a product versus the amount of advertising they see promoting the product. (One might even place how much objective information/research they've discovered about the product on a secondary horizontal axis.)
The overall slope of this curve then represents the "marketing susceptibility" of that population. I posit that marketing susceptibility is inversely proportional to the average rationality (or "informed actor"-ness) of the population.
Furthermore, I think that if this study was performed on households, the change in marketing susceptibility as a function of age shows the level of education of the population; well-educated populations should tend to have a flattening of the marketing susceptibility curve with increasing age.
I've been getting about 150-250 blog spams per day now, and it's just too much a hassle and waste of time. Not that many people comment anyway, so I'm turning comments off. If you wish to comment on an entry, email me at pzw1 at cornell dot edu.
I hate spammers.
At this year's Austin City Limits, we got to hear Mason Jennings perform, and he was great. We bought two of his albums on the iTunes music store, and the other day on my commute home, I finally heard (really heard) the song "Adrian" for the first time. The lyrics are amazing but what really makes this song incredible is Mason Jennings's nuanced singing - he delivers just the right amount of resigned, sorrowful hope:
Looking down from the apple tree
My hands tied in back of me
With this rope below my chin
We don't fear death my adrian
Trust me son that one day soon
You'll be on the bottom where the boat breaks through
To let our freedom in again
We don't fear death my adrian
From now on I am part of you
I am the story that you'll tell
Let my life empower you
Let my troubles teach you well
Let your burning hatred go
Learn yourself until you know
That fear is where all hatred begins
We don't fear death my adrian
From now on I am part of you
I am the story that you'll tell
Let my life empower you
Let my troubles teach you well
As they set my last breath free
Turn your eyes but don't fail to see
The love you feel inside your skin
We don't fear death my adrian
We don't fear death my adrian
The lyrics are just... brilliant. Even without Mason Jennings's amazingly honest voice singing them, just reading them infuses me with such a profound sense of sorrow and an inexplicable awe at the beauty of mankind... all the hope in the midst of all the sorrow across so many millenia of human suffering and brutality.
This song, plus his wonderful song "Butterfly" (from the polar opposite of the emotional spectrum) have put him on my short list.
This past weekend I attended Brad's annual bonfire in scenic, rural Lancaster County, PA. I've only been away from the Northeast for 7 months and already I've become a weakling when it comes to cold weather. It stayed above 40 the whole time but I was at times freezing my ass off.
Crystal and I also visited with the Cardones and went apple picking with them near Unionville. They had a litter of kittens that they were trying to give away, and they've still got their horses. Chiara couldn't stop talking about Polocrosse, and we schemed up plans to get her and Christina down to Texas for some Polocrosse matches.
Work so far this week has been going well, and I got a more detailed schedule (or list of requirements) laid out through the end of next week and our Big Bend trip. I also downloaded and have been trying out ActiveState's Komodo IDE for Python development, and it's *sweet*. No major problems thus far, and I'm eager to see how well it stands up to serious development usage.
Also I discovered Harf BBS, a telnet-capable BBS with a zillion doors. I can't wait to get some serious BRE action going. This time around, I won't have to worry about my mom picking up the phone halfway through my turns. (Ah, the simple pleasures of adulthood.)
Ok, I'm going to really start blogging now.
Ready?
See, blogging nowadays sucks. The narrative blog voice, which used to be "introspective first person", has been perverted by the massive hordes of teenie bopper bloggers (teenie bloogers?) into something horribly whiny and presumptuous. When I first started blogging, before it was called blogging, I just put a daily record of my activities online. Nowadays one is expected to be witty and insightful, or, failing that, dry and cynical.
So I'm going to reinvent blogging by going back to basics. A neo-classical approach, if you will. Ready?
Today I woke up at 8:15am in a room on the 16th floor of a Holiday Inn about 15 miles outside of Houston, TX. I had lunch with a geophysicist and an MIT graduate in the cafeteria of the corporate offices of a large petroleum company, and between the hours of 3:30 and 7pm, my body channeled the equivalent energy of 25 pounds of exploding TNT.
For dinner I made stir-fried spicy chicken and rice. As I cooked I noticed that Jane had made a new friend outside. I went to investigate and introduce myself but her new friend fled by running up and jumping over our back fence.
Since October 1st I've been working at Enthought, a small, privately-held scientific and business software company here in Austin. Our office is in the Bank of America build at 6th and Congress, right in the heart of downtown. If jihadists decide to get medieval (or pre-medieval, as it were) on Austin, I'm probably going to be doing some high speed base jumping.
Right now I'm working on refactoring and improving Chaco, the core plotting component of the Envisage framework, but in the longer term I'll be working on electromagnetic simulation. It's great to be coding Python again.
After many happy, cold years in the Northeast, my fiancee and I are moving to Austin, Texas. Not only will we be warmer, but we will also be together finally. We are planning on moving in mid-February, and have begun preliminary apartment-hunting down there.
If anyone has any pointers on food, culture, housing, or anything else Austin-related, please share them!