I've been taking notes in ideas, which is okay when they actually are ideas, but what if they're not? The following, for example, is definitely a note:
[02:45] <crschmidt> i love it. it's a great interpretation. [02:45] <sbp> :: ah [02:45] <sbp> :: "interpretation"--bleh [02:46] <sbp> :: <- the person behind these colons is a purist
Actually it's a note that I need to update phenny's syntax for this thing somehow, but I don't really know where to put it. pwk-todo perhaps?
<d8uv> aLSO, SOMEONE SHOULD RETHING THE "cAPS lOCK" KEY.
This just gave me a chuckle:
* sbp flies d8uv to the moon <sbp> LUNAR D8UV * d8uv orbits <d8uv> DAmn .. u, sBP!
It's weird that when I'm not writing nonsense to the d8uv.com weblog, I'm passively writing nonsense to other blogs as well. --by d8uv on #d8uv.com
Notice of Wrongness: The undersigned would like to declare to the universe that the adoption of the word "parawet" for a chemical by the chemical engineering community is beyond wrong (parawrong, one might say). Signed, Sean B. Palmer and Cody Woodard.
What's Going On
Stuff I'm thinking about today, as April creeps up on May:
- Writing about my directory structure, to bring it more into line with my current best practices, and phrasing it all as an email to kandinski since he'll likely be interested.
- The /on/ directory. It still needs projname naming, which is a bit of a bugger, but the three ideas for articles are pretty awesome.
- Doing more radical stuff. I have a list of things that I could do that are fairly radical, not in the sense of being shocking but of just not being very low hanging fruit: of making discoveries in particular fields, of making connections. They all require a lot of commitment, so I'd have to be careful to choose the ones that have the best risk-to-cost ratio.
- Publishing some bits of my juvenalia in an updated form. I'm not sure why I haven't done that before, really, given the absolute plethora of material I've worked on—it'll just be difficult to reconcile it with my current works given that none of it is really that compsci/literature/astronomy/+ blend that I'm doing with inamidst.com
- Rowrcolo. Rowrcolo is totally awesome, and (sadly?) I'm starting to get cool ideas about what stuff I should put there, which is becoming an increasing contrariness to the SPACE CADETS email. D'oh! It still may be the case that the activity level is high but the quota that I waste up will be low, however, so that might work out. I really do need infomesh.net there, I think. And I really like kapwned, incidentally.
- Writing to miscy and the /code/ and whatnot directories here. I'm also trying to get my homepage in a more gleaming state since I'm doing the SFP stuff, so that's all kinda intercombined: PR and Propaganda and Python.
- Reading, philosophy, usual stuff. I'd like to write about oratorical skills and politics, philosophy both occidental and oriental, and most of all much much more on genius. I found out about Swedenborg recently, who's a very interesting character; and the Fortean aspect links into /lights/ and so on: it's nice how paranormal stuff seems to be the best place for inspired scientific research.
That's one shimmering lattice of awesome, but just being a layabout is good too: you need to wu wei them both somehow.
Addendum: Wallace and Gromit are great too. It's nice how this is generally moving away from computer science, but in another sense I think it's moving more into computer science. It's nice how computer science is founded on a set of very strong principles that you just have to learn about to become a good computer scientist: that's why I was so shocked the other day when crschmidt didn't know what Turing completeness really meant. In fact, I'm not sure what it really *means*, but there's certainly a scale of knowledge and insight about such things; with people like Pat Hayes being able to push the boundaries on such matters and the rest of us merely being able to employ it as conversations pieces. But it shows how well read you are in a field if you have this background common knowledge of such stuff. I've noticed that the educational system in the UK has a bit of a problem there in that it goes from a very low key broad phase into a very high key deep phase without any transition between the two. I think that what's expected of people is that they have a genuine interest in the field that they delve deeply into, but I don't feel that that's actually the case in perhaps as much as 99% of students. In any case, there are ket principles of computer science that just take over what you do until you become Dan Connolly-like in your liberal application of process and logic. Generally, that's very useful though it does have two potential drawbacks: first, you might start to get irritable when others aren't as logically process minded as you; and secondly, if you have too firm a belief in the validity of your logic you might miss the fact that the overall picture is far more subtly nuanced. There's a very irritating trend amongst society nowadays to generalise things, to try to come to a compartmentalised abstract understanding of what's going on. This may stem from the Scientific Method, wherein one has to try to find the underlying patterns that account for things, so that we have equations for acceleration that neglect wind resistance, and thought of Newton's Laws as being perfect until Einstein came along and told us that actually the real picture is far more complex. Obviously there is utility in such things, but it's application in places where such application is undue that causes the problem. For example, favouritism and intelligence are seen as being transitive almost hierarchical things: this is perhaps so far from the actual case that it's blighting our society as we scramble over one another to become the best in all the tests that we're faced with both in our education and in our work. We decide that we like one band more than another, or one book more than another, which destroys our ability (if we even had it?) to see that we understand different aspects of art depending upon the context, the setting within which we take it and our current emotional and logical moods. It's impossible to fully appreciate any work of art, because to do that you'd have to be all people appreciating it in all contexts before you got the sum of all the possible meanings. Artists themselves, I can say for a fact since I dabble in being one sometimes, come to slowly appreciate their works more fully over time. It's quite well known that some people produce works of art that they hate themselves, or come to hate—so why did they produce it? They just didn't know exactly what they were capturing, but knew that they had to capture something, more than often. It may also be, of course, that what they ended up capturing what not what they intended to capture, and so their dislike of their work is actually a euphemism for their disgust at their own lack of talent. Again, that might be a bit of a narrow-minded view to take: art is such a subjective experience at times that even the worst pile of crap might mean something moving to someone; and if you want to capture a particular thing that much, then you've usually got the opportunity to do it again. Even I'm abstractifying now though. Sometimes there are things that you can only capture at a certain time and then they're lost. When Brian Wilson originally set down to record SMiLE, he had the Beach Boys around to do it, but for whatever reason the album collapsed. Now that he's gone back in to re-record it, he's still done breathtaking material, but it's not *quite* as it would've been if he had recorded it fully in the 60s. That's not to say it'd be any better or any worse (that's transitivity again!), but it would certainly be *different* and that difference is now lost except for all the bootlegs and the tens or hundreds of fans who try to piece together what might've been from all that 60s studio material that's still lying around.
There probably should've been a few more paragraph breaks above, but I didn't notice all that much since I'm typing this on IRC with its weird line-break form of punctuation that doesn't come across in this work. It might be nice to try to preserve the line breaks in the source somehow, and then set the ability to toggle them being visible in the text using Javascript.
Back on the Air
Eph is now back on the air having gone down in the Great Hardware Crash that affected both inamidst.com and miscoranda.com; both sites being essential to updating Eph. This is underlined to just what extent Eph is a very fragile setup, and getting it back into working order—even though I still had about 95% of the code lying about—was really not trivial. The main problem is that Eph is a dynamic site, that's being written to from the phenny IRC bot, but one of the core conditions of inamidst.com is that it's an entirely static site. I have discussed using unison to get around this, but that is also not a trivial program to run, and, moreover, will affect the efficiency of each upload, not just when I want Eph to be updated.
It may be that at some point I find rsync is taking too long anyway, and in that case I'll likely improve the scp version of nftp that I've already written but not publically published. At that point, also, I may again look into unison, which should allow for a more dynamic approach to the site, so I'll be able to work on pastebins and URI redirectors and all the other services that the Internet has far too many of already.
As for Eph, I've actually quite missed it. I even wrote a 2000 word entry to Christopher's noets installation on the new keywordsy meta-database system I'm working on for inamidst, and I think there were a couple of other things too. At least it's back now.
--2005-05-19
Testing rsync...
rsync really needs to say what it's actually doing to the files it's transferring