Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
Matt Harding
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Category Archives: General
Enthusiasm for Prizes
Kevin Drum asks why conservatives like prizes so much? Which makes me wonder, is it more popular with conservatives? To me, they are just a tool. It’s clear you can organize them in ways that are very productive and constructive [1, 2]
Winners tend to like contests, since having mostly won they think they are fun. But I don’t see any reason to argue that conservatives are more likely to be winners. Leaders on both side of the political spectrum are probably winners.
Contests; as a contracting device, pay for outcome rather than labor. I.e. contests are piece work. The left is more sympathetic to labor. All the risk is left with the contestants. A contest sponsor can write the rules in ways that are highly advantageous for him. Netflix’s search contest did that. While Google’s android contest did not. See my previous posting about NASA to offer prizes. The question is always, do you trust the house.
Shangri-La Diet
I lost about 25 pounds on the Shangri-La Diet before my attention wandered to other hobbies. But I still keep an occational eye on that community. One of the most impressive results is this chart showing various reports from folks on the diet.
This data is tainted by the how it is self reported, but none the less it is amazing. The other day Seth reported some fun data for one dieter, who lost about a pound a week for two years! He wrote a nice posting a while back about the fun he is having with his little community of users. And this is a nice research result that makes complete sense given the diet’s punitive explanation, i.e. that standardization make food more fattening.
Traveling
On the road.
While you can buy a very wide range of pretzels in Allentown PA, avoid the the cheese pretzels.
In Ithaca NY you can buy a tee shirt that says “War is UnIthacal.”
The Chicago Bean rules.
The Sauerbraten at Berghoff in the Loop in Chicago is just fantastic.
A friend passes along (thanks) this fun little hardware kit for doing Conway’s Game of Life. I wrote a lot of versions of Life years ago, often in assembler. I was sad a few years ago to read about a faster way of coding it up than I’d every thought of. This hardware widget makes me thing about they way fireflies sometimes synchronize. I’ve imagined a flock of umbrellas with blinkers along these lines.
Landslides and Translations
The recent Chinese earthquake (70 thousand dead) took place in a mountain range that abuts a densely populated (600 people/sq mile) plain. Many rivers flowing out of those mountains are blocked by numerous landslides, which according to landslide expert David Petley are very tenuous. The loose soil damn creates a lake behind, soaks through and collapses or it over-tops and fails or another landslide into the lake creates a wave which over-tops the damn and it fails. At that point a wall of water heads down stream destroying further landslide damns as it goes along with everything else it encounters.
A huge landslide damn and lake in China unwound over the last few hours and amazingly the Chinese appear to have managed to orchestrate it’s collapse so the worse case scenarios were avoided. It’s been amazing to watch the story unfold on David’s blog. Reading between the lines over the last week I certainly got the impression that he was extremely sanguine about their ability to pull this off.
Watching this situation develop I’ve been reading Chinese new accounts, with the help of Google’s translation service. I highly recomend it. I have a little bookmark I use; very simple javascript:void(location.href=’http://translate.google.com/translate?u=’+location.href); Which you can play with by draggint this to your browser’s tool bar: Translate! No doubt there are more sophisticated versions but that one works for me translating pretty much any foriegn language page into English. Here’s an example page: silly bizzare fish stories. There is a lot of nutty tabloid news out there.
Time Machine – ouch
This morning my Mac’s backup (time machine) reported that the backup disk (a sparse bundle on a time machine) was read only and it couldn’t backup. A bit later I noticed the error was more serious: “The disk “Backup of Pra…” was not repairable by this computer. It is being made available to you with limited funtionality. You must backup your data and reformat the disk as soon as possible.” (sic).
So I fired up Disk Utility; hit open; browsed to find that sparse disk image. Found it. But, it wasn’t available to open; grayed out. Browsing the web I found the suggestion that I should drag the image into Disk Utility’s window – that opened it.
At that point I tried letting disk utility try to repair the sparse image. No luck “Invalid sibling link.” Argh. I found a posting that implies I can buy a more potent disk repair utility ($50), but instead I’m just going to discard the backups and start over.
This, and reading various postings about the problems people are having with their Time Machine backups is quite distressing.
Water’s series, using producing
Posting for the memory book. Appendix A in the Common Lisp manual is a package Richard Water’s created known as series. A series is a kind of hybrid between sequences (think lists) and streams. They are cool because the resulting code is damn fast; usually compiling down to raw loops. In anycase I had more trouble writing the following than I expected. I kept writing setf rather than setq; which creates some bizarre errors. Errors printing results actually. It would also be good if I’d actually read the doc for producing, rather than just skimming it, for any given FOO or BAR the (next-in FOO ...) and (next-out BAR ...) forms should appear once and only once. You get extra points if they appear at the start or tail of the tagbody respectively.
In this example we want to inhale two series nibbling off one or the other as appropriate. Series a pain to use when doing this kind of mingling; but mostly because they don’t have a way to seek forward more rapidly than pulling items off the inputs one at a time. What also makes them painful to use at this level is that you have to write at a level that is enjoyably only because it invokes a nostalgia for assembler language. No doubt it one was writing a lot of his kind of code then you’d make a micro language that compiles into this pseudo assembler. The series sources do something along those lines; making them wonderfully hard to read.
I’m really not fluent in using this package, so critiques from more expert users would be welcome.
(defun union-integer-series (s1 s2)
"Given two ascending series of integers return a series of those integers
which appear in both."
(declare (optimizable-series-function)
(series s1 s2))
(producing (items) ((g1 s1) (g2 s2) i1 (i1-ok nil) i2 (i2-ok nil))
(loop
(tagbody
--TOP--
(if i1-ok (go --I1-OK--))
(setq i1 (next-in g1 (terminate-producing)))
(setf i1-ok t)
--I1-OK--
(if i2-ok (go --I2-OK--))
(setq i2 (next-in g2 (terminate-producing)))
(setf i2-ok t)
--I2-OK--
(unless (= i1 i2)
(cond
((< i1 i2)
(setq i1-ok nil))
(t
(setq i2-ok nil)))
(go --TOP--))
(setq i1-ok nil)
(setq i2-ok nil)
(next-out items i1)
))))
By example
> (setf *print-length* 7) 7 > (scan-range :from 5) #Z(5 6 7 8 9 10 11 ...) > (scan-range :upto 9) #Z(0 1 2 3 4 5 6 ...) > (union-integer-series * **) #Z(5 6 7 8 9) >
Mindreading webpages!
Ben Adida brings our attention to this cool, but evil, hack for seeing into your visitor’s minds!
Aza Raskin’s hack is a bit of java script that lets you adjust the web page based on the user’s browsing history, say to show the bookmarking links that this user actually uses. I was quite amused at Aza’s use of the term village bicycle to describe a page that links indiscriminately to dozens of 3rd party sites; it reminded me of the term link slut. This technique works because you can put a few dozen links on your web page and then using java script the page can glean out which ones the visitor has previously visited; using that data the javascript can then customize the page.
But now I’m fascinated by the idea that you could build pages using this technique that glean estimates of various attributes about the visitor. For example say you put a few dozen each of left wing and right wing political sites and then compute a score for where on the political spectrum the visitor is. It would be fun to make a bunch of examples. Age, sex, politics, income, etc. Each one of these could be distilled down to a single Javascript widget, it might display a badge. An exercise for and upon the reader.
This is a perfect example of the kind of thing which Caja[1,2,3] is meant to fix. We should all send positive thoughts in that projects direction at regular intervals.
Boffins look to brain scans to breath life into Web Frankenstein!
The World Wide Web Consortium’s offices are in the world’s most marvelously silly building, the cartoon like Stata Center. Among these boffins are a few working to bring the Semantic Web to life. Nearby other experts labors away on computer science’s more esoteric arts: robotics, origami, cryptography, even user interface!
Surrounding the Stata Center are larger less fanciful buildings full of wetter sciences: brain sciences, genetics, and such. More of the bland massive buildings are going up all the time.
The Brian Sciences center looms outside the windows of the folks working on the Semantic Web. Over the last few years I’ve often wondered if that was a little joke on somebodies part, the Gods possibly. Or that God of campus life, the facilities manager. This kind of thinking afflicts my brain. Put two random things in and I start finding amusing associations. It is often a kind of a buzzword bingo in here.
So I was delighted to encounter this article in Ars Technica, which garners a very high scoring round at buzz word bingo. “The Semantic Web gets a boost from functional MRIs.” The author must have been giggling! I think his headline writer let him down, I like my headline better.
Cities
Paul Graham writes about ambition and cities. Paul seems quite concerned about ambition, status, but yet I really like this essay. It’s a nice variant on the well studied theme of specialization in cities. Regions specialize, for example Hartford in insurance and guns, and so it’s natural that each region’s alpha-males would be drawn into that specialization. Those who particularly aspire to ladder climbing will then strive that way.
The other thing I like about Paul’s essay is how, no doubt, natives of each venue he passes over will be offended. He is, of course, making quick cartoon versions of each town and cartoons always offend somebody.
The New York City he describes is not the NYC of my youth. More than anything else the NYC of my youth was about diversity. So many many things packed together into one space. It was, it seemed to me then, impossible to climb to the top of that pile. There were so many distinct piles, all running off in different directions. I can certainly feel that same way about NYC these days, but yet his caricature of NYC as a place where the ambition is all about wealth rings true, about Manhattan. So much of Manhattan seems more like a odd walled community of the rich built out remnants of the more authentic city that was there before.
He allows that Silicon Valley is about power. Sure that’s true, but it would not be at the top of my list. At the top is a pervasive engagement with building things. Usually via entrepreneurial activity. While I have hung out in lots of places where people talk about it, the Valley is the only place were it was in the water. And there it was a form of play; like football or dancing. People who love to do create firms that do something new everywhere you turn. If that’s your kind of fun then that’s the place to live, just as if you love playing in a good intellectual thicket living in Cambridge you will find it easy to find other playmates. What he says about power, it’s true. It’s something that the guys that came and had a lot of fun building things come to learn, but they all seem sad about.
He seems to be describing smaller cities, like the one Hammett sited Red Harvest in, where the whole place’s workings could be revealed by throwing one or two well aimed spanners into the works. Cities over a certain scale ought to be able to be about many things, not one, and so they shouldn’t by default drag all their strivers into a single pattern. I don’t know, maybe globalization has made that something of a nostalgic fantasy.