Checked out The High Line on the way back from work. It's really cool. Kind of snakes amongst and through the buildings like a plant. Congrats to the designers.

Future travel is coming together. We now have plane reservations for the gaming convention in Essen. We're traveling together, which should make the flight more pleasant. Unrelatedly, someone from our team will be spending two weeks in the Sydney office

Returned from Boston via Greyhound. The good: outlets and wifi. The bad: the wrong bus came first, and they told us *after* taking our tickets. It all worked out in the end.

Saw a mini-opera at a shopping-mall/performance-space downtown today. Very fun. Very dramatic. Could have benefited from subtitles. Have I mentioned I love this city?

Marched with the Google contingent at pride. Not a big contingent, but the tshirts were cool. Pride was more of a parade than a protest. I think gay rights just aren't controversial anymore (at least in NYC).

Looks like Australia is happening! I talked to Jordyn this afternoon and he said I should pick some dates.

I seem to recall you were impressed by the real one :-)

Manhattan is seriously lacking sites for a Fourth of July cookout.

Fireworks display was very impressive. Much artistry. Much height. Much spectacle. There were five (?) separate displays from separate barges, but when they shot a spread of broad lingering fireworks they managed to form a continuous curtain of light

Crowd control at the fireworks display was very unimpressive. I would up at 11th ave and 28th st, in the middle of the intersection, so I missed the low-to-the-ground stuff. I think most people were farther back. West side highway space was announced,

An anonymous donor has pledged City Harvest $5 per facebook fan. City Harvest is an amazing organization that can provide a pound of food to hungry people for only 28 cents. That means that becoming a fan provides over 17 pounds of food.

Tentative Sydney plan: depart NYC thurs aug 13, arrive SYD sat aug 15 (weekend to get settled and recover from jetlag), depart SYD mon sept 7 arrive nyc "same" day. Very tentative.

Got a call from Qantas today. My credit card rejected paying for the tickets. I went down to the bank branch (now redecorated as Chase) and after significant discussion learned that my card has a purchase limit a little below the ticket cost. It cannot

I've been to the Zoo. I said I've been to the Zoo

I called the Novotel Sydney Darling Harbor and said "Speyer". The phone op said "Daniel". It was an enormous relief.

˙uʍop ǝpısdn ƃuıǝq oʇ pǝsn ƃuıʇʇǝƃ ɯ∀ ˙ʎǝupʎS uı pǝʌıɹɹɐ ǝʌɐH

I wrote a post about getting here, but it was too long for facebook. I put it at http://miscreeds.livejournal.com/7244.html It's been a long time since I used my livejournal.

Updated Aug 15, 2009 7:32:05am

The bridge opens

View from the bridge: east

View from the bridge: north

View from the bridge: south

The only weird wild animal I have seen so far

My luggage arrived. I went out in clean clothing (yay!) to explore the neighborhood. See photos below.

went to the beaches today. There's a great set of cliffs running along the coast from Bondi to Bronte: broken and undercut sandstone. Saw a yellow crested cockatoo halfway up one of the cliffs, and some little amphibians in the tidal pools. Waves crashed everywhere with massive spray. It was great for climbing and bouldering too. Completely unrestricted: no law except gravity (though that one can be harsh).

Pelicans have excessive beaks

Penguin at the surface from below

The peacock decided to watch the seal show. It wisely avoided the crowds by standing on the roof of the lift.

Kangaroos sleep with their legs at odd angles.

Wombats are naturally cuddly. Do not cuddle them.

Your ear. It haz a flavour.

Kangaroos mostly walk around on all fours. They only hop on their hind legs when they're in a hurry -- in which case they move too fast to photograph.

Yes, that thing below the big kangaroo's arm is a little kangaroo's head.

I tried to match the "can't believe it's real"ness of mom's Hawaii pictures in this zoo set, but the duck billed platypus wouldn't stay still long enough to photograph. Also too fast to photograph were the zoo keepers training the leopard seals to jump a meter out of the water -- even though the wall separating their enclosure from the penguins was only a meter high. Both were great to watch, though.

Googleplex (external)

A nerf gatling gun, to defend us from tour groups (one of two)

An aloewall, to counteract firewalls

A central corridor (including crocodile and fishtanks)

A conference room -- now with ordinary chairs

I posted a few Google office photos, in case people are interested. They seem to be appearing and disappearing from facebook (backend synchronization issues?)

I'm going offline after this. I figure I'll head out to Manly Isthimus this afternoon, and stay their into the evening (it may be dark enough to see the southern stars). Then tomorrow it's to the airport and home. I'll be back online late sunday evening, new york time. It's been a good trip, but it will also be good to be home again.

Sitting in san francisco airport, through all security, awaiting connecting flight.

28 solid hours of travel packed into one day is exhausting, but 12 solid hours of sleep is enough to recover. Many chores to do, but it's good to be home.

Today I investigated why my apartment is so dim. The fluorescent in my bedroom, the fluorescent over the stove, the incandescent in the kitchen and the halogen in the living room all burnt out. I replaced them (except the halogen -- have to track down one of those) but am disturbed that so many supposedly long-lived bulbs died while I was away.

Sedimentary rocks remind me on zion

More rocks

Bands of erosion

Ocean over rocks

Impressive waves

Opera house from the water

No, I did not return to Australia. I just found a bunch of photos I forgot to post at the time. They're from Manly (or the trip from).

Had one long nightmare about trying to bring a grandfather out of nested delusions by basic first aid while being shouted at by an impatient cat and distracted by an improperly installed air conditioner, an overheating build machine (or was it?) a road trip, and a scar that was secretly a fairy.

recently bought a copy of Passion (by Sondheim), which I had listened to often many years ago, but not at all recently. It's *much* darker than I'd remembered. After several listenings, I'm still not sure if this is a different performance or if it's just my perspective that's changed. Freaky.

Light bulbs again. This time it's the one over the stove and the incandescent in the kitchen ceiling -- both of which I replaced when I got back from australia. I wonder if my kitchen is over-voltage.

In Berlin and tired.

Wandered through the government center of Berlin. The city is surprisingly spread out -- as if it had been built post-car (rebuilt maybe?). A few specific buildings were older (including two 17th century churches), but most looked 20th century. The we went to the musuem of realy old stuff, which was ancient indeed, but not german. The greek and assyrian collections were impressive, even by Met standards.

The reichstag -- no visible burnmarks

The Brandenburg gate

Despite the Assyrian style, this is a Babylonian palace. I resisted the temptation to prophesize doom.

More of the same -- everybody likes lions.

Carved basalt from near the source of the eupfrates. Should be Assyrian sphere of influence, but looks nothing like cuniform. There was an explanatory panel, but it was only in German. Aah languages, creating and preserving mysteries.

Visited the DDR (east Germany) museum. It seemes like they almost had things working, and yet terribly didn't. Then visited the Reichstag. The line was no shorter than yesterday, but we were more patient. We wentup the glas sdome on the top, which is an imressieve bit of engineering, and a great view of the city.

played a very long game of Tichu with many many blunders on all lsides. Finally, after 10 failed tichus, including a double failed tichu, it was 995-805 them. No one called Tichu. My partner went out. I had an ace, a straight and the dog, and a singleton was coming to me. I played ace, straight, dog -- we went out 1,2 and won. 20 hands total.

visited the Charlottenburg Palace. Very impressive. Roman gods on every ceiling (except the ones which were destroyed in WWII). Intricate woodwork and gold inlay. An entire room dedicated to Queend Sophia Charlotte's collection of Chinese porceline. A baroque formal garden covering over an acre and windows and mirrors to asthetically bring it into the house.

Arrived near Essen. Am staying in the NH Hotel in Oberhausen. Originally planned apartments sprung a leak. Internet access is spotty.

found many interesting things, but now my feet are very tired.

Played Sumeria (great game) in front of the publisher with Peter, Matt and Hubert. They said we were the slowest and most thoughtful players they'd gotten all weekend. Then played Hive with Peter in front of the author and reached stalemate (not enough pieces able to move to achieve victory). He said games weren't supposed to look like that. To be fair, at least 2 moves in that game that were just mistakes.

Went to Koln. Ancient city. Roman ruins sticking out at random. Immense, ornate cathedral with spires, pillars and statues everywhere. Also a chocolate museum/factory, which was both interesting and tasty. I took a few pictures, but they'll need editing. Tomorrow, back to the convention (and try to understand DST).

back in NYC. Trip was pretty smooth, even the last bit when I took the NY subway at 5:30pm with a 27kg suitcase. Good to be home.

likes the giant wall-hangings he picked up at Essen, but can't quite figure out how to arrange them in the living room. They're bigger than they'd seemed in the convention center.

The current setup of my hung walls. The waterfalls that got displaced by the blue abstract hanging are now framing the stained plastic light.

As long as I'm stitching together and color-tweaking photos, here's Koln Cathedral.

And here are some of its many statues. The white one is probably a (comparitively) recent replacement.

hates orzo code. Orzo code is what happens when OO fanboys target the ravioli code prefered by theorists, but go too far and let the meat::wrapping ratio approach zero.

very much enjoyed the all-weekend gaming party.

has 4 wave invites left. They seem to go out in a somewhat reasonable timeframe. Anybody want?

This is both the scariest and most awesome bit of research I've read in a long time.

Updated Nov 16, 2009 9:28:51pm

Arrived in Puerto Rico. Checked into the hotel slowly and with much drama. Room has a beutiful view of the beach, which I will go down to now.

walked back through the falling snow from the store where I bought aloe to put on my sunburn. Felt a bit of dissonance.

is getting very annoyed at Nature. They often put just the first paragraph online with the rest of the article behind a paywall. Fair enough. They then fill the first paragraph with background, fluff or human interest (in the mainstream newspaper tradition) leaving no real information!

went outside. I'd call it about six inches of snow in the few places where it hasn't been matted down or mounded up. Some cars have been trapped in by the snow plows. There were snowboarders on the steps of the civil war memorial (which are now a snowy ramp) and sledders on the hillsides of riverside park.

Office decoration is basically done.

Updated Dec 21, 2009 9:58:18pm

is proud of his company. A little overwhelmed, a little scared, but still proud.

Updated Jan 13, 2010 1:22:26am

planned to leave early, go to bed early, and be ready for the terribly early bus and the hunt tomorrow. Instead stayed late finishing http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/ . Worth it.

Lesson learned: when doing data conversion on really depressing data, don't look at it manually any more than necessary.

Second lesson learned: don't believe release times.

Victory!

is tentatively planning on visiting Mountain View from March 1 to 12, and wondering if he's forgotten some conflicting obligation.

A light dusting of snow and a thick layer of salt on the sidewalks. I think we'll be all right.

View out the window. You can't really see the still-falling snow in the still picture, but it's still falling.

Updated Feb 10, 2010 3:11:37pm

Corrected dates: I expect to be in Mountain View March 15-26

Just joined "I Bet We Can Find 10 Million People Who Support Same-Sex Marriage". Feel like just yesterday I joined the "1 Million" version. Maybe I should jump ahead and join "I Bet We Can't Find 10 Billion People..."

A few photos of NYC shortly after a major snowstorm

Updated Feb 28, 2010 6:00:06pm

has been asked to recommend programmers to Google recruiting. Is anyone looking for a job? Google's a great place to work.

next journey: Dublin april 12-16 (to meet the rest of my new team)

The plan this morning: visit the Guggenheim (where I haven't been in ages). The line at the Guggenheim: out the door, down the block, around the corner and not moving. The result: visited the Met instead. Went to bits I don't usually see (and a few I do). A day well spent.

In a small, out-of-the-way display case, the Met keeps the hands and feet from their greek and roman sculptures

Updated Mar 06, 2010 9:39:50pm

Am settled into a corporate apartment in mountain view. No suitemate so far. Am very tired.

had a productive two weeks, but is glad to be back home. The journey went smoothly, except at the end, where the 123 trains were all confused.

might be visiting Dublin for two weeks (10-25) instead of one. Nothing definate yet. These tickets will be bought somewhat last minute.

wandered down to battery park city. The prominade along the waterfront is very pretty, but the rest of the neighborhood is rather bland and awkward to navigate. I'd rather stay here on the UWS.

thinks facebook needs a "become a foe" feature.

Updated Apr 07, 2010 12:59:11am

filed taxes. Good to get that done before going off to Ireland. The process was aggrevating, though. The IRS already has my W2 and 1099s. Why can't I go to IRS.gov, enter my charity numbers and my direct deposit information and click "send me money"?

arrived in Dublin

is glad that the next week's stay was already planned. Several people were figuring on flying back today or tomorrow and are now looking for last-minute hotel extensions. Volcanoes are probably the ultimate uncontrollable disruption.

was slightly creeped by facebook's new "secondary email" request box. It offered me a list of my former email addresses that I hadn't given it. They must have come from my friends' mailboxes.

finally got out to explore Dublin. Went to the archeology museum (small, but very cool) and the art gallery (very focused on european painting). Both museums were housed in former 18th century (?) palaces, which was a nice bonus. Then wandered the streets just looking. Dublin is architecturally nifty in that buildings of many different styles and eras are all jumbled together. Photos of the streets coming later

Photos from my wanderings

Updated Apr 18, 2010 3:07:11pm

helped some co-workers get on a bus to Madrid. It's about a 30 hour drive from Dublin. They say they've solved the water problem, but the haven't said how.

walked along the cliffs by the water from Bray to Greystones. Very pretty. Much of the cliffs are earth, not stone. Pics will follow, but maybe not until I get home.

Went into downtown Dublin. Didn't get anywhere because I stopped to listen to all the street musicians. They were good.

had an uneventful journey. It's good to be home.

finally got around to posting the cliffwalk photos.

Updated May 01, 2010 11:03:19pm

Yesterday: wandered south-east across central park to find a good viewpoint for manhattanhenge. Arrived early and almost gave up before I realized the timing. It was cool. The light ran all the way down the streets, making things glow. There were golden streaks on the sidewalk. You could see it approach by the reflections off windows getting closer.

decided to experiment with baking. Opened my flour and found it full of ants. No sign of them outside of the (sealed) package, so I figure they layed eggs in the wheat. Very annoying. I want irradiated flour. Maybe next time I buy some I'll stick it straight in the freezer so nothing hatches.

finallygave in and started listening to music at work. Not only does it cut down distraction wonderfully, but with Wagner and Weber for comparison,our team seems low-drama.

Where but HOPE could you have a well-researched presentation on Anonymous in its historical context? Complete with lolcats?

Sorry for ignoring everyone this weekend. HOPE was intense. Fun and enlightening, but not leaving much energy for anything else. I'll try to clear the background tomorrow.

In the airport, heading to the world boardgaming championships. Wondering if any of my pre Google friends will be there.

Learned a game called origins. It tried to be simulationist and failed. Like roads and boats. A morass of confusing rules and broken flavour. Then eeked a power grid victory against experienced players by two money and crushed a pair of le havre newbs.

My winning streak continues with brass, power grid and a nap. Maybe the nap wasn't victorious, but it felt that way.

Lost brass. Definitely exhaustion. I could feel my mind fading. In hindsight, I guess my nap was a defeat as well. Fortunately, it doesn't effect the tournament, anyone with a win goes to semifinals.

Power grid schedule failure. Maybe just as well, avoids conflict tomorrow. Double le havre victory, on to finals!

Lost the le havre final. Ah well. Next year. In lessor news, I found a vendor that sells 2d rubber bands for game boxes, and confirmed it was ESR that was playing Dominion Prosperity with Rob and Pei-Hsin when I came over.

The original

The parody

There's this Dumbo Arts Festival this weekend. It looks pretty cool, but the schedule just has names, no descriptions, and I don't recognize any of them. And it's spread throughout the city, so I can't just go the The Festival. I guess I can always pick randomly.

the more I see about the Rally to Restore Sanity, the more I want to counter-protest in favor of madness. It could be highly amusing.

Tomorrow's fun.

Updated Oct 01, 2010 11:02:41pm

found the article on perfect-information bubbles again. I've forgotten exactly who wanted the link, so I'm posting it here.

Updated Oct 02, 2010 12:06:58pm

That was great fun. I think we outnumbered the normals at the Pop Tarts Store at least five to one.

When I refer to people who seriously shop at the Pop Tarts Store as "normals", there's either something seriously wrong or something seriously awesome.

I have felt drier coming out of a swimming pool.

Being sick is never fun. Getting lectured by my own subconscious in one dream after another about the nature of sickness and that I have one is rubbing it in.

There was white powder on the ground this morning, but more of it was salt than snow. Now it's just cold.

Just finished reading 1635: The Eastern Front. Good first half of a novel, but in desperate need of a second half. Direct sequel (I think) scheduled for April 5, 2011. :-(

Back from hunt. It went awesomely, but I'm now exhausted. I think it's less from sleeping about 6 hours a night than from spending the other 18 around people. Awesome people, but still.

This was kickoff. The music before the video starts was a more conventional wedding theme. My contribution was the projection screen.

Updated Jan 17, 2011 10:25:56pm

This is what my street looked like this morning.

Updated Jan 28, 2011 1:16:54am

This may be the most awesome thing I have ever read:

So if we observe, statistically, over many time slices:

P(M2|L1,L2) = P(M2|M1,L1,L2)
P(M2|R1,R2) ≠ P(M2|M1,R1,R2)

Then we know causality is flowing from left to right

Updated Feb 07, 2011 12:45:44am

1. Read Eliezer Yudkowsky's ideas on morality
2. Was very disappointed
3. Tried to do better

Was way too long for facebook, so I made it a blog post. It's been while since I put anything on LJ.

Updated Feb 21, 2011 12:58:06am

just deleted Comodo from his root-CA list. You should too. In firefox, Edit>Preferences>Advanced>Encryption.

Updated Mar 31, 2011 10:07:59am

Receiving cryptic warnings from owls -- typical dream. Researching later and discovering that they were barred owls, a specific species, and they really look exactly like the ones in the dream -- creepy.

found the mouse that had been annoying me. On my floor dead, under some clutter. No obvious cause (not that I'm any sort of rodent forensist). Did my sealing of the room work, only it was in here with me the whole time and died of thirst? Did I step on it and not realize? Did it hide in a plastic bag and asphyxiate? No way to know. Kind of creepy. One problem gone, at least.

WBC schedule looks good this year, except for the same Le Havre/Power Grid conflict as last year.

Remember the slogan "make cupcakes, not bombs"? It seem MI6 listened.

Updated Jun 06, 2011 10:32:51pm

Two years living in Washington State, many visits to California -- now I experience an earthquake.

I will state for the record that as of 9:47pm Gristedes was fully stocked except for preservative-laden bread, which was such an outlyer that I think it must be a supply-line glitch. Contrast the panic-buying in Bellevue when that moderate-size snowstorm hit. I'm proud of my city.

Overheard at work: "Is that a radio-controlled flying shark?" "No, it's infra-red."

#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
printf("Goodbye, world.\n");
return 0;
}

RIP Dennis Ritchie -- we couldn't have done it without you, for almost any value of it.

The #NanoWeenStories tag has finally gotten me to sign up for twitter. Of course, it may be a while before I post anything else.

Thanks to everyone who sent birthday wishes

I'm back home. It was a great trip, but by now my own bed feels very nice.

Meatspace SOPA protest went pretty well. About 1500 people I'd guess. Very orderly, to the point of feeling less energetic than a normal protest. Cops were friendly. The senators issued a wishy-washy statement that indicated they had at least noticed, which is more than I'm used to.

The speakers' focus was rather economic. I'm more concerned about free speech as a human right than about creating jobs, but I can see how this angle plays well to the audience. Politicians hate freedom, but they like prosperity. At one point a speaker asked everyone whose company was hiring to raise their hands -- almost everyone. It was a nice moment.

After many discussions of the "Innocence of Muslims" film, it's interesting to hear one of the cast step forward. As had been rumored, the dialog wasn't what was shot. I also found interesting that she'd completely failed to get word through the press and went instead to Neil Gaiman.

Updated Sep 18, 2012 10:28:32pm

I suppose it's well past time that I announce this generally. And it goes well with the end-of-the-world theme of today.

I am no longer working at Google.

I don't know where I'm going next. I'm not in a real rush to figure it out. Sometimes taking time is good. Meanwhile I have practical questions, like which t-shirts I'm still entitled to wear.

I've had this almost-finished on my hard drive since shortly after last hunt. Seems time to finish it up and post it:

I Don't Know how to Love Him it Turns out He's my Brother
From Jesus Christ Super Star Wars

Leia

I don't know how to love him.
What'd I do? Why'd I kiss him.
He's been changed, yes really changed.
In these past few days, since he's seen Yoda
He's seemed like someone else...

Vader

I don't know how to hate him.
Sith are not meant to be fathers.
He's a knight. A jedi knight.
And I've slain so many knights before,
in oh so many ways.
Is he one more?
Should I make him fall?
Bring him to the dark?
Teach him how to hate?
Leave a father's mark?
I never thought I'd love again,
without Padme's spark...

Leia

Don't you think it's rather gruesome,
I should have such a distraction.
I'm the one they all look to.
To stop, to bar, the next death star.
Fighting for what's right.
Not just some knight.

I never thought I'd feel again
After Alderaan.

Vader

Yet, if he would confront me,
I'd be proud. I'd be honored.
I'd slay my lord. Betray my lord.
I'd cast him down an endless shaft.
I wouldn't mind to die.
Don't ask me why.

Both

Oh how do I
view that Jedi?

As may be apparent, I've decided to give facebook another try after basically ignoring it for the past few years. We'll see if it sticks. I've probably missed a ton of stuff that happened in the interim. Oh, well.

Apparently this is International Tell Your Crush Day. I'm not 100% convinced this is a good idea, but it's an interesting one, and putting a schelling point on it is clearly a good start. But it only serves that function if the crush knows as well as the teller. So I am publicly announcing that I know about this and promising that if anyone tells me about a crush I will do my best to avoid awkwardness or other bad consequences. If you're willing to make that same promise, I encourage you to make the same announcement.

Updated May 07, 2014 2:03:25pm

My system hard drive did this:

[Wed May 7 07:34:08 2014] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 93599752
[Wed May 7 07:34:08 2014] EXT4-fs error (device sda3): ext4_find_entry:1206: inode #1082739: comm updatedb.mlocat: reading directory lblock 0
[Wed May 7 07:34:08 2014] Aborting journal on device sda3-8.
[Wed May 7 07:34:08 2014] EXT4-fs error (device sda3) in ext4_reserve_inode_write:4476: Journal has aborted
[Wed May 7 07:34:08 2014] EXT4-fs error (device sda3) in ext4_orphan_add:2417: Journal has aborted
[Wed May 7 07:34:08 2014] EXT4-fs (sda3): Remounting filesystem read-only

Fortunately /home is safe. I'm actually kind of impressed how well my computer works without write access to the root filesystem. Still, I can't stay with this. Remounting rw fails with "block device ... is write-protected". I'm going to try rebooting. If that doesn't come back happily, I think I'll be buying a replacement hard drive.

I've just been reading about DNA operons and polycistronic mRNA, which *do* exist in eukaryotes. In this case, a single mRNA gets processed by ribosomes as one unit to form multiple proteins. The proteins are created in exactly equal numbers (modulo translation errors) and do not need to be related. If they decay at equal rates, they will have the same numbers permanently. One could do something and the other could be a transcription factor. It's not perfectly robust, but it's pretty close to autoregulation for *arbitrary* proteins.

Mwahahahahahaha!!!

"Of four strains evolved at different lactose levels, which displayed increased or decreased lacZ expression, two showed mutations"

Is it too late to believe in magic?

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7050/extref/nature03842-s1.pdf (page 8)

Updated May 09, 2014 8:32:21pm

I have today and tomorrow to turn my 18-slide presentation into a 12-page paper. Not as crazy as it sounds. I'm glad I'm using TeX for both, because it means I can change the documentclass, search-replace \begin{frame} with \section and go through rewriting, instead of having to face a blank page. First pass is done. I used my high laptop-tray with a milk crate for added height as a keyboard rest and did the thing standing, which does seem to have been good for my concentration. I'll probably use that trick again.

Now to try to graph a system of three differential equations that might explain X inactivation in a way that's clearly readable on a 2-d display

Meanwhile, for those bored of *micro*biology, here's the view outside my window. I haven't been able to get this close to a wild animal since Galapagos. Most of the time, the adult is sitting *on* the chick and there's not much to see. I guess it's comfortable. Like a heated feather mattress, only in reverse.

Final paper sent. That's the last of my work for the term. I'm not entirely happy with it, though I think my professor will be -- it's clearly the sort of thing a student does, not the sort of thing a real biologist does. Ah, well. At least I learned stuff doing it, and it's given me interesting things that I'll think about without time pressure. Also in the good news category, I can now read papers in biology journals mostly fluently, which I couldn't a few months ago. That's a useful skill.

Grades are in: 2 As and an A- in Machine Learning. Normally I don't think much of grading, but I'm actually rather proud of that.

Just ran across this story online (apologies to everyone who's seen it already). Thought I'd share it mostly for this line:

> She *didn't* think they were worse. But it felt like she *should*, just to counterbalance everyone else.

Updated Jun 03, 2014 12:03:44am

Just finished this TTA game online. Thought I'd share my final board. I've never had this much age 3. Nor have I ever gotten so many of my points at the end (I started my last turn with 60). I ultimately lost by 1 point. I would have won if my militant opponent had seeded Impact of Strength instead of Competition, or if I'd drawn any relevant impacts.

A few nights ago I had a dream (a literal dream) that seemed interesting enough to share. I and a few friends were shooting eachother with high-power squirt guns as a game. We were a bit overheated so no one actually minded getting hit, but we pretended to because that was the game. Then another friend (these aren't specific people, my dreams only contain details when they need to) came in with a similar squirt gun and started shooting us, and we shot back, and he got really upset about us shooting him. He'd just come from someplace cold, and it was quite unpleasant. He didn't want to be left out of our game, but he didn't want to get shot at. We weren't willing to get shot and not shoot back, even though getting shot felt ok, because it placed him in a dominant position over us. My last thought before waking was "short of open, honest, good-faith communication, there is no resolution to this dilemna." My first thought after waking was "in addition to that, we would need a high level of self- and community-awareness." I feel like these scenarios happen *all the time*, and people of different temperatures with squirt guns may be exactly the scenario that's needed to actually think about it.

I'm not sure how this got stuck in my head, but now I'm going to stick it in all of yours.

ttto Age of Aquarius

When the moon turns red as flowing blood
And Jupiter devours Mars
Then fear will fill our planet
For right shall be the stars!

'Twill be the ending of the Age of Humanity
Age of Humanity
Humanity! Of Sanity!

Things beyond our understanding
The world unto them remanding
No more comfy imprecision
Soon we'll see with crystal vision
Going mad from revelation
Hand-in-hand with devastation
Humanity! Not meant to be!

Now the moon is dark as clotted blood
And Jupiter is done with Mars
And fear has filled our planet
For right are now the stars!

This is the ending of the Age of Humanity
Age of Humanity
Humanity! Who'll mourn for thee?

Breaking the usual pattern that songs about dancing are hard to dance to, Leonard Cohen's Dance Me to the End of Love makes a great tango

The pigeon hatched on my air conditioner is now off flying. It came to visit my bedroom window, where it discovered the outer ledge of the lower window isn't wide enough to stand on.

So this seemed like a good time to check the state of my living room air conditioner. The condenser works, but the fan doesn't. There are a lot of sticks *inside* the air conditioner. Turns out it is safe to open that window, so I tried removing a bunch of sticks using my leatherman, needle-nose pliers and claw-on-a-stick screw-grabber. This didn't work, but was really, really disgusting.

I have now washed my hands, covered them in (70%) rubbing alcohol, set them on fire, and washed them again. I'm glad I know how to do that safely. My tools are soaking in a bowl of bleach, with a fan venting fumes to the outside.

I think I'm going to have to throw away my air conditioner and buy a new one. I still don't know what happens if I take it out of the window. *Hopefully* the support underneath it doesn't need pressure to hold it in place, but since I didn't install it I don't know.

Meanwhile, my bedroom air conditioner is working again. So I have something to keep me cool.

In happier news, my copy of Signal Processing & Linear Systems arrived today, despite the vendor saying the 11th at the earliest. This is the textbook for the prerequisite for Columbia's course on making cyborgs. I bought it mostly so I could make sure I already knew it. I didn't want to pay full price, so I bought it from some random overstock in India. Are we living in the future yet?

Somebody rang my doorbell to talk to me about green electricity. But not to talk very clearly. Apparently I was one of only three people in my building who hadn't "responded to the message" (I find this hard to believe) and he didn't want me to sign a contract, just "make a phone call" (from inside my building?). I can't quote the whole thing but it ended something like:

Me: Are you here to confirm receipt of a message or to get me to do something?
Him: It's not a contract, I'm just looking to make a phone call and you can always go back --
Me (angrily): Give me a straight answer or I shut the door.
Him: You can shut the door; I'm not here for myself I'm --

And that's when I shut and locked the door.

I still don't know who he was actually from or what he actually wanted.

Putting some of my little projects on github to serve as a portfolio of sorts...

Updated Jun 13, 2014 7:21:51pm

From the "stuck in my head for too long, so now I'm sticking it in yours" department, Age 4 leaders, wonders and governments:

Hari Seldon: You may look at the current and future events decks freely, and re-arrange them as a political action, though you cannot move events from one deck to the other, nor put a later age event before an earlier one. No one may attack you unless they have at least half your culture income.

Jean-Luc Picard: You may have multiple pacts, including multiple pacts with the same player. You gain culture income based on your completed wonders (Age A: 5, Age 1: 3, Age 2: 1).

Della Lu: Each lab and library gives military strength equal to its level. Revolting to anarchocapitalism costs you no actions. Gain 1 civil and 1 military action.

Ender Wiggin: Your temples give science equal to their happy faces. You can automatically win any aggression or add 10 to your strength in any war (multiple times in one war, but not beyond the total max military strength) at a cost of one permanent sadness. This sadness remains even if Ender is discarded.

Darth Vader: Once, as a political action, you can destroy a territory. Also, you can treat one unit as being of a different type for tactics purposes. Gain 10 strength and 2 military actions.

Pham Nuwen: On your turn, you can convert food, rock and accumulated science into each-other at a 3:2 ratio (round down) or trade them to your opponents at any agreed-on ratio. Also, if anyone gains rock by attacking you, you control their next civil actions (1 per 3 rock taken, round up).

Stellification of Jupiter: Search through the discarded territories for ages 1 and 2. Take up to 4. Gain their ongoing (but not one-time) benefits.

Human Brain Decompilation: Your best lab, library and theatre each produce double.

Ressurrection: As a civil action, you may bring a discarded leader of a previous age into your hand. Any effect which would decrease your population instead moves those people to the worker pool.

Unfriendly AI: Everyone loses

Anarchocapitalism: 10 civil, 3 military, -5 strength when attacking, +5 science

Hive Mind: 9 civil, 5 military, +4 happiness

God-Emperorship: 7 civil, 7 military, +10 strength

I got fed up with spurious page2rss updates for fanfiction.net stories whenever somebody reviewed, so I wrote a sanitizer. Now I'm trying to figure out a way to integration-test it, since apparently I *can't* just create an ffnet account, post a story, and update it a few times.

Updated Jun 20, 2014 7:35:04pm

In Earthsea, the summer solstice is celebrated by dancing straight-through dusk to dawn, and then the singing of The Creation of Éa. I danced midnight to 3:30am, and sang one verse. Getting there.

Ages ago I went to an all-black sock drawer, but lately I've been finding myself caring about exact matches in contexts where people will see my socks (fairly common). I've also lately noticed that a lot of my socks are falling apart, and need replacement anyway. After removing the bad ones, I found I have three primary styles, with 8, 7 and 7 of each. I would like to have 28 socks (2 weeks worth). I could buy 20 of the most common type, but throwing out 14 perfectly good socks seems inelegant, and I'll probably flinch when I see the price tag (they don't seem like the sort of thing that should be expensive, and yet...). Or I could buy 6 more of this style and separate my sock drawer in half, requiring one bit of sorting each time I launder. Decisions, decisions.

This was a very mundane post. I think my next one had better be about obscure biotech to balance it out.

My dead air conditioner uses R410A as a refrigerant. I went looking for disposal laws. I couldn't find anything really clear, but the materials safety sheet gives toxicity data for its components, including: "Pentafluoroethane: LC50/rat: > 800 000 ppm". I wonder if there are any substances for which a rat *can* survive having 80% of its own body mass stuffed into its lungs. Or is that not what "Acute inhalation toxicity" means?

I won't be able to make this because it's the same weekend as HOPE, but I thought some of the non-hacking boardgamers on my facebook might be interested

Updated Jun 28, 2014 11:56:48am

Since I'm not seeking a dark wilderness this weekend, it seems only sensible that I go to watch Pride. I'm not very tied-in. Does anyone have advice on where to watch from, relevant feeder marches, or anything else I should know? For that matter, is anyone interested in watching together?

Live blogging Pride: the mayor leads the parade, followed by comptroller, public advocate, city council... I wonder what the first year that happened was.

LBP: guy across the street with a sign "Jesus save us. I repent. Amen". He's probably repenting homosexuality, but I prefer to believe he's a former homophobe repenting his hatred. It's a wonderfully ambiguous sign.

LBP: I'll say this for NYPD: they put together a good marching band

LBP: Oz themed costumes for It Gets Better Project. I think I missed something.

LBP: That's the second angel of death I've seen marching. Am I missing something? Or do some marchers just enjoy awesome, bad ass costumes?

LBP: MasterCard slogan: Acceptance Matters. Well played, MasterCard, well played.

LBP: the mermaid parade had a polar bear club. The pride parade has a bear club. I wonder if there's any overlap.

Air conditioner successfully replaced. Easier than expected. The removal and installation are actually quite straightforward, and lugging an 80 pound air conditioner up a flight of stairs isn't as bad as it sounds. I took the old one out using disposable gloves and mask, but foolishly a t-shirt I would rather keep (Cyberfun). So now that's soaking with detergent while I try to figure out what to do with it.

Yikes!

Updated Jul 09, 2014 12:48:01am

I registered for WBC as a member back in December. It recently occurred to me that I know enough unaffiliated attendees to put a team together. Does anyone know if it's possible to become a team at this stage, and if so how? Thanks.

Weird discovery about my mind. I started keeping a private journal (probably won't make a habit of it, but occasionally writing things is good for getting them clear in my head) and found myself unable to do it. I *can't* write without an audience in mind. It can be a vague audience, but I have to have some idea of who's going to read something or I can't put one word after another. Finally I decided I was writing to my future self, about a year from now, and then I was able to write. And my thoughts did indeed get clearer. So, success -- whether I go back a year from now and read it or not. It's an interesting insight into how I write.

Weird discovery about my mind number 2. Twice in the past week I've gone into full panic mode over something completely innocuous where the true explanation was outside my hypothesis space. Somehow Occam's Razor and Principle of Charity just go out the window when I panic. So does remembering to search for additional explanations before judging about the ones I've got. Hopefully now that I've noted this failure mode, I won't fall into it as badly.

Yesterday the elevator television news was talking about how among the dozens of innocent people killed when Russia's proxy army in Ukraine shot down a civilian airplane, there might have been *an American *. Today Ellsberg commented that Snowden got more attention than Manning because Snowden revealed crimes against Americans. Disturbing...

Most interesting thing from Ellsberg / Snowden -- Ellsberg said that government officials who know about crimes against the constitution and don't whustkeblow are oathbreakers. Snowden refused to condemn them, even if they're guilty. Said fear is human nature and we should approach the problem like engineers: focus on how to help them and make the situation better.

Updated Jul 20, 2014 9:49:51am

My latest silly hobby is HFYs. For those unfamiliar with the term, an HFY (it stands for "Humanity, Fuck Yeah") is a story in which humanity generally awes and terrifies everyone else. Everyone else is usually aliens, but elves and demons have also held the foil role at times. I've written a handful now, and they've been pretty well received. One even got declared "featured content" and put on the sidebar. So I thought I'd share them here too. They're not very serious, but if you've ever felt the need to feel good about your species, check them out.

Updated Jul 25, 2014 9:08:15pm

This morning's moral: just because you draw three military cards every round doesn't guarantee any useful attack cards.

I have many upcoming conflicts

Updated Aug 04, 2014 8:05:19pm

End of last TTA heat: I had 7 civil actions, 10 stone, and 2 mineral deposits. First Space Flight would cost 3 actions. So I couldn't do it. I'd burned actions several times that past game, so I pointed out the irony. I also commented that I was considering seeding an event in the hopes of New Deposits, which would put me over. The player to my right pointed out we'd already seen that. I said "at least you can't get out your Fast Food Chains either". He said, "sure I can, I'll plunder you". I did various things including disbanding all my mines and spending all my stone. "Go on," I taunted, "plunder me." He said, "I think I'll seed Impact of Industry instead". (In fact, he seeded Impact of Population, which favoured him more.) Out popped Economic Progress. Which he'd seeded. And enabled Fast Food Chains. A one in three chance, but still.

Much later, I was wondering a little aimless between events and I ran into the third player from that TTA heat. She encouraged me to join Concordia, a game I didn't know. She taught me in about 10 minutes, leaving me feeling very rushed. But I joined the heat because I had a dead place in my schedule. I won. Either there's more luck than it seems (but AFAICT there's hardly any), or the other players at the table were also pretty new, or I have an affinity for this sort of game. It is a good game, and I decided that before I had any idea I was winning. You both build board positions that get you things and a deck that determines how your board gets scored. I hope I don't get another chance to play it here, though, because the remaining heat and semi both conflict with the Brass final.

Went to the demo of WBC The Board Game. Looks pretty cool. It's not finished yet, but you can pre order it for $50 or become a "competitor" card in it for $100. And, yes, it has a card for itself.

Let Havre semis: 5 steel, 9 iron, 3 coke, gobs of charcoal, 3 actions. Plan: ship, steel, ship. Shipping line blocked. Make all the steel anyway for flexibility. Then build iron ship from steel. Then ship 10 steel 3 coke for 95. The guy who blocked the shipping line won, but it was close.

I have Peter Gabriel's "Games Without Frontiers; War Without Tears" running through my head. It probably wasn't written about the World Boardgaming (and wargaming) Championship, but it *should* have been.

I have come to the conclusion that the 4 iron in canal era is a trap. Sure it's 18 points, but it increases the risk of over builds on the 2 and 3, prevents any rail era over builds of your own, and makes early devs much harder, both because everybody else is getting the cheap iron and because expensive iron starts looking like a threat. Those devs are crucial in a 4 player game.

At my Carcassonne table, one player looked about 8 years old and kept talking about how we should help each other. I thought: "no way - he's probably ruthless as can be and really good at this.". I beat him by two points and we left the rest of the table in the dust. Almost half of our points came from a 42 point city in which we each had two meeple.

Two women at Ingenious were wearing corsets. I guess when you expect to spend most of the day sitting with no practical back support...

Lost the Concordia semi. 5th overall. The 3 games of it I'd played earlier were 4 player, and the semi was 3. It changes the pacing of the game. You have to buy cards earlier. Funny how quickly I develop dependencies. Can't call it unfair, though, I don't think the winner had played 3 player before either.

Laurels: 4th in Le Havre, 4th in Trans America, 5th in Concordia. Not my best. Object level moral: I need to keep a closer eye on how my opponents can block me. Meta level moral: to really remain competitive I need a regular game group to stay in practice against. Bonus discovery: Concordia is an awesome game.

Now that Scott's on tumblr, I figure we have 5 years at most to create getstungbymillionsofwasps.com. I'm picturing a blogging platform that automatically fills your feed with people you disagree with and who are at the opposite end of the intelligence spectrum. There's be no "like" button, only "hate". The comments moderation tools are completely unusable but posts will be dropped at random so that people can complain about being silenced. As an upcharge addon, you can click to actually deliver live wasps to someone's door, like an inverted reddit gold.

SHARC contains separate harmonic data for cello martelé and cello vibrato, but does not contain guitar or piano. Priorities, I guess.

So many tools for continuous systems, but you just can't take a derivative with respect to musical instruments.

I'm glad to see harmonics without hardcoding them, but *so* *much* *noise*

I've gotten this far before, but never quite this neatly

Successfully distinguished violin solo from bell choir 13/13. Victory!

Now I need to stop thinking about this stuff and really mind-shift to neurology.

Reflecting on the phrase "I don't want to like broccoli 'cause then I'd have to eat broccoli and I don't like broccoli" (h/t Brienne Strohl). I'm pretty sure there's something really important going on here, and I can't quite put my finger on it.

None of my classes this term use textbooks: the subject matter is too new.

Before the (outdoor) wedding, we were worrying about rain and making Alanis Morissette jokes. Then, as we began the ceremony, it did start raining. And thundering. And the thunder only gave the ceremony extra power and gravitas.

Now THAT'S ironic.

I've been thinking about anthropics and identity, and it seems like a lot of the problems go away if you think of is-me as outputing a scalar instead of a boolean. That is to say, Daniel_tomorrow is a lot more me than Britney_tomorrow, but Britney_tomorrow is more me than Stalin_1945 who is more me than a typical hyena who is more me than a rock. There are a lot of reasons to like this.

First, the territory is continuous so the map *has* to be. A sufficiently powerful being *could* turn me into Britney Spears one synapse at a time, and is-me shouldn't output garbage for the intermediate states.

Second, it removes "I expect to experience" as a primitive, but gives us a tolerable approximation in "I expect the one being tomorrow that is-me>${threshold} to experience". This behaves exactly the same way in all intuitive scenarios but becomes specifically incoherent in exactly the anthropic thought experiments we want to call undefined. Note that this definition also throws a clear error message regarding what I expect to experience after death, which is a desirable property of a philosophy.

Third, it rescues selfishness. Selfishness isn't incoherent; it's just a technically flawed approximation that's good enough for all practical purposes, like a Mercator map of downtown Quito. Philosophically correct selfishness is to multiply a high power of is-me to each being's happiness before weighing.

Fourth, its weirder consequences seem to match what people do pretty well. When I think about people who rate comparatively high on is-me, they are people whose well-being I prioritize. Some of that is friendship, but the effect doesn't go away completely with people I haven't met. Similarly, if I find myself in a hypothetical situation that will end soon no matter what, my first instinct is to act in the interests of the me that inspired the hypothetical and will continue to exist. This is hard to explain otherwise, but his is-me score is almost 1. Finally, time discounting makes more sense if I just have a low prediction for how much Daniel_2040 is-me.

This seems too easy. Have I missed something?

> We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we will investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio's performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some people can discern some distortion), this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate.

-- excerpt from Can a Biologist Fix a Radio?

The most disturbing thing is that I feel like I've done this in software.

Updated Sep 09, 2014 5:24:47pm

I was the 75th person to vote in my district. I realize districts are small, but for this late in the day that seems like really low turnout.

Read a long survey of medical conditions associated with changed microbiome ratios, including a few where restoring the microbiome reliably cures the patient. Am considering a blanket avoidance of anti-microbial preservatives.

Does there exist a short summary of LW-style rationality? Just something I can point people to when they ask "what do you mean by rationality?"? If not, I might try writing one.

The state of the field of neurology as I understand it:

There are bottom-up neurologists who start by figuring out ion channels and then see how those are assembled into synapses, neurons and networks. They use a lot of differential equations, optogenetics, fluorescent tags, and microscopes. They inspire psychiatric drugs.

Then there are top-down neurologists who start with the whole brain and figure out how it's organized into cortexes and centers. They use a lot of MRIs, stroke-victim case studies, and behavioral tests. They inspire brain surgery.

The gap between them is only a few orders of magnitude, but it doesn't seem to be closing.

Turns out there exists a Petrov Day ritual. Less Petrov-specific than it might have been, but seems pretty powerful.

Updated Sep 18, 2014 12:34:43am

The intention is to fill up Facebook with flowers to break the saturation of negative images and videos on your timeline. I was assigned calla lily

Updated Sep 30, 2014 2:31:06am

If I have hurt you in any way in the past year, I apologize. I don't think I have any outstanding quarrels with anyone here, but if I do, let me know and I will do what I can to make amends.

I was reading the book of Jonah (as one does on Yom Kippur) and something jumped out at me that hadn't in the past. Twice, G-d asks Jonah “Is it right for you to be angry?” (alternate translation “Are you deeply grieved?”).

This is a question I hear a lot in mundane contexts. Except it's not really a question. The real message is usually “It is not right for you to be angry, regardless of the extent of your suffering (which I have made no attempt to understand) because your suffering isn't real because you aren't a real person.” And this is a terrible message that no one should ever send.

So I was surprised to see G-d asking the question.

My first thought was that it's an important *question*. We do often get angry when we shouldn't, but also sometimes when we should, and it's important to know the difference. But it's not being used as a question here. Yes, G-d spends a lot of time in the interrogative, but it's a very socratic interrogative. G-d already knows the answers.

My second thought was that the real lesson is to ask *ourselves* that question. It's a difficult question to pose properly in the second person, but a very good one in the first person. This is true as far as it goes, but we're seeing the second person here.

My third thought was that the second person *coming from G-d* is a special case. But that seems like a fully general reason to ignore most of the Tanakh.

So lets take a closer look at the text. G-d doesn't force the correct perspective on Jonah, nor demand it. G-d opens a dialog, and asks questions, and listens (Jonah doesn't say very much, but he has a fair opportunity to make his case), and makes points Jonah can understand.

This seems like a good guideline for those of us who wish to attempt this question in the second person. First establish trust (this happened two chapters earlier). Open a fair dialog. No matter how confident you are that you're right, structure it as if you were unsure which of you would end up changing your mind. Start talking from where the other person is. Oh, and have it on a barren hilltop overlooking the city, not the Ninevah market square.

Or, if that seems like too much, stick to asking the question in the first person. That works too.

Reflecting on the contrast:

Deuteronomy: It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven, to bring it down to us, so that we can do it?”

Meditations on Moloch: It is not up in heaven, so we have to ask "Who will ascend into heaven, to put it there, so that we can do it?"

The parallelism isn't perfect, but it's disturbingly close.

For those who liked my Courage Wolf minimetafanfic, there's more of it.

Writing in the Wolf's voice is hard.

Updated Oct 06, 2014 2:17:55pm

TIL the capacitance is 1 nanocoulomb per millivolt. Always.

For anyone on my friends list who hasn't seen three copies of this already :-)

Updated Oct 12, 2014 1:47:05am

Bad news: this serious genetics research comes in PC and non-PC versions.

Good news: the PC version assumes uniform memory access, and the non-PC thread-local.

I was at this last year. It was awesome.

Updated Oct 20, 2014 2:35:41pm

Went to a fascinating behavioral genetics talk. Didn't know that was a real thing. Most amusing part: hearing the phrase "het females" refer to hetero*zygous*

From the trusting-science-less-dept:

My neurology textbook said there were exactly five flavors: sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami (also burning, but that's pain not taste). Not too long ago, it would have said four. Note that this isn't "five well-understood flavors" or "five common flavors". Just "five flavors". Anything else you notice about food must be smell or texture or imagination or something. You can not, for example, taste fat.

Never mind that cooks have long had the adjective "rich" to describe the flavor of fatty foods.

Never mind that fat is a major source of calories and recognizing it reliably would be a huge evolutionary advantage.

Never mind that the snack food industry has made billions in profits using the "people enjoy eating fatty foods" model.

Never mind that fats are large molecules with low vapor pressures that would be very hard to smell.

Never mind that we have no particular reason to expect taste to be so limited.

Never mind that the list of fundamental flavors goes back to Aristotle, who got very little exactly right, and that other ancient cultures had different lists.

Never mind that experiments on human taste should be pretty easy to perform and apparently no one bothered.

Ignore all that. You can't taste fat.

Two years ago, a group of geneticists found the biochemical pathway by which we can taste fat.

I expect the scientific community will update now, but probably to "there are six basic tastes" and not to "we don't know how many basic tastes there are; we understand six of them".

But the really interesting question is: which heuristics proposed before this would warn us that Taste Science was not to be trusted? It's easy to generate heuristics based on this case, but that way lies overfitting.

Things I felt inclined to share from today's Symposium on Microbiome/Brain Interactions:

I arrived at the Rockefeller University visitors' entrance and explained myself to the guard, who gave me directions. Among the instructions was to take the "marble path". Upon reaching it, I discovered that it was a path paved with marble flagstones. Mr Rockefeller really did have more money than he knew what to do with.

I reach the auditorium as one talk is finishing. The presenter is explaining that sex-linked behaviour and brain structure differences go away when you knock out a gene that's only expressed in T cells (in mice). Disease threat theory of heteronormativity?

Sticking victims in a room with an alpha is a reliable way to produce PTSD (again, in mice). PUAs who are fond of animal ethnography please take note. Also anyone who runs a school system or similar.

Very early childhood gut lactobacilli cause differential gene expression in the hippocampus. The genes in question relate to how mitochondria integrate into the cell. The mechanism and effect remain unknown. I'm wondering about the evolutionary significance. Does the brain have an energy-saving mode? Could a few simple transcription flips give a significant intelligence boost, with the only cost an increased caloric requirement?

One presenter: I work with the adrenal system because it's very hard to diagnose autism in mice. Next presenter: these are the metrics I use to diagnose autism in mice.

Inoculating with B fragilis can cause a permenant change in the microbiome, but the resultant community *does not contain B fragilis*. The presenter didn't continue on this theme. My best guess: microbiome/immune interactions form a system of differential equations and introducing a powerfully anti-inflammatory microbe can jostle the whole system out of a local minimum.

The B fragilis intervention decreased intestinal wall permeability and relieved some, but not all, autism-like symptoms (again, in mice). Remember how intestinal wall permeability and autism came up with regards to wheat? Maybe eating wheat is safe iff you have the right microbiome.

General principle: all interesting biopsych is done in mice. I suppose there's valid ethical reasons for that, but maybe next time the politicians decide they are absolutely positively *going* to do horrible things to someone, they can turn that someone over to research?

I think a lot of people on my friends list will appreciate this, and I don't think it's reached internet saturation yet. (Less confident about the latter.)

Updated Oct 25, 2014 1:34:51pm

Paranoid thought of the night: if there were a phylum of intestinal bacteria with major differences in the "highly conserved" regions of the 16S unit, would we know? How long could we count up PCR products without noticing something was missing?

Anyway, it's late and I really need to get to sleep. I'll let you all worry about that.

My first-round antitrust check arrived. It's $565. After all the talk of billions, I am underwhelmed.

Proposed concept: quasipurpose: the equivalent of a purpose for a person acting in a non-agenty way, such as the reward pattern of behaviourism or the survival or reproduction advantage in an evolved role. Does this seem like a well-defined and useful concept?

Happy Dennis Ritchie Day!

Updated Oct 30, 2014 12:04:53pm

Arrived mid-tanda in a crude vampire costume. A woman in a better vampire costume was sitting onthe side, so I asked her to dance and she said yes. The first full song wsd Hotel California. I'd never realized it was about vampires. Stabbing the beast with steel knives doesn't kill it? Of course not: you need wooden stakes. No wine? Ve do not drink... zat spirit. Check out but never leave the vampiric thrall. So simple.

Most of you have probably already read this, but those of you who haven't might be amused.

Updated Nov 02, 2014 12:08:34pm

For house of representatives, I can vote for the incumbent, for the candidate who instead of a website has a friends-only facebook page, or for the candidate whose website reads "1721days since
Election Day". I sure feel empowered to be voting in that election.

It turns out New York has a "Sapient Party". I like the idea of government by sapient beings, but I see no sign that they qualify.

Does liking the idea of government by sapient beings make me a reactionary? I'm still against the vast majority of their positions.

Why is comptroller even an elected position?

Everyone agrees that gerrymandering in New York state is a problem, and there's a proposition on the ballot to do something about it. The League of Women Voters says it will make things better, but Common Cause says it will make things worse. Neither has presented a really clear argument or engaged each-other's points in any way. They say arguments on the internet are bad, but arguments in real life are clearly worse.

Achievement Unlocked: used ∞≈0.02 in a a serious mathematical argument

I recently ran across an article about how pokemon promotes dangerous occultism. I don''t know if it was meant satirically. But one line jumped out at me:

> What if they carry their favorite monsters like magical charms or fetishes in their pockets, trusting them to bring power in times of need?

I like it. Just needs a touch of metaphor...

This ambiguous evidence is confusing. Statistics, I choose you! Statistics uses Bayesian Updating. It's super effective!

Thinking of every skill you develop as living in a pokeball in your pocket seems like a kind of nice way of looking at the universe.

My project got picked! Now to actually do it.

For those I haven't rambled at about this yet, my project is to use baeysian networks to determine causality in observational microbiome and disease data, especially metabolic and autoimmune disorders. I believe this has the greatest mid-term resultant QALYs of any of the projects proposed, and it seems my classmates agree.

Do I get some sort of LW-applause-light prize for that paragraph?

I was thinking about The Gift We Give Tomorrow (linked below, in case any of you haven't read it). The "Naive" rationalist expresses surprise at the existence of goodness, and the "Austere" rationalist replies:

> Are you claiming to be surprised by this? If so, question your underlying model, for it has led you to be surprised by the true state of affairs. Since the beginning, not one unusual thing has ever happened.

Of course, unusual things happen all the time. For there to be a million one-in-a-million events every day, there need merely be a trillion events.

But that doesn't really explain it. There aren't a trillion things as important as goodness. So let's question our underlying model. What are we missing? It's hard to explain with a causal element, because it's similarly weird for anything nongood to create goodness and it's even weirder for anything good and potent to predate the universe.

But could it be a selective element? An anthropic selection?

Imagine a species as intelligent as humanity, but without goodness. There's still gratitude and kin loyalty, just no fully general concern for others. They have scientists, much as we do, because knowledge is power.

But they don't have publication. Again, because knowledge is power, and why would you give power to your enemies?

Those who learn valuable things pass it on the their children or their apprentices. Or sometimes they die unexpectedly before they can. Occasionally, a mutual-aid society will form, but it will be plagued by free-riders. Sometimes a strong centralized authority will stop that, and such a society becomes strong. But with strength and centralization comes succession crises, and within a few centuries the loser's last act is to burn the library to spite the winner (this threat helps secure a conditional surrender, but brinksmanship is a dangerous game).

They never discover evolution. Having to start from approximately scratch every few generations prevents them from gathering enough raw data in one place to put together a theory. So they never ask "How did a world like that bring forth beings like us?".

Only we ask that question. Only we, who, by some genuine fluke, live in a species containing goodness.

Updated Nov 10, 2014 6:34:22pm

I took it when it first launched. Spreading the reminder for people who missed it.

Updated Nov 14, 2014 12:31:33pm

Ever since the elevator failed, I've been using the emergency exit to reach the laundry in my building's basement. It's an internal staircase. It's always been steep. It's always been narrow. It's always been unpleasant.

But now the lights have failed, so it's pitch black, too!

For those who were annoyed at the Barbie the Computer Engineer book (which probably includes my activist friends *and* my programmer friends), some of these are quite amusing. Granted, a lot aren't, but if you have some time to kill.

Updated Nov 24, 2014 5:20:48am

TIL chimeraing mice with human *astroglia* produces greater long-term potentiation and learning, but *not by any of the mechanisms we know are associated with that*. Just when I thought we understood this stuff.

Updated Dec 01, 2014 12:56:56pm

Actually did get my neuro homework working, but what a mess. Even stuff like matlab's fft function and associativity of matrix multiplication were flaking out on me. Considered including in the writeup my speculation that the problem set had been composed in some sort of desecrated graveyard, but decided the TA would not appreciate that.

Recently looked at my hands. They're covered in long shallow scratches that I can't remember getting. Have I been getting in fistfights with velociraptors and then having my memories wiped? Should I be worried that that's the first hypothesis to come to mind?

Went to attend a presentation at the School of Public Health on the medical campus. I walked into the building from the street, walked into the elevator, pushed 8 and thought I felt the elevator go down. But I looked out an 8th floor window and it was a long way down to the ground, so I concluded I had felt wrong. Then I went to the elevator to return to the lobby and pushed the down button, but the downward-going elevator refused to go up to the lobby until it had dropped off a 7th floor passenger.

You win again, Columbia floor numbering.

The actual presentation was moderately interesting. A lot of stuff I'd heard before. Two amusing bits:

You can find patterns of use by matching microbiomes. Doorknob matches skin because people touch them with their hands; welcome mat matches soil; bedroom floor matches dog fur, etc. Toilet flusher matches soil -- apparently someone in the study bathroom flushes with their feet.

The Human Microbiome project is only taking data from WEIRD adults, a tiny fraction of total diversity, and probably not the healthiest.

Yet another paper discussing the Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes ratio and obesity. Those are phyla. You don't hear ecologists talking about chordate/arthropod ratios. And those are a lot easier to pronounce.

Mwahahahahahaha!!!

/vaguebook

My printer has a very 'simple', 'intuitive' interface. There's only one button, two access doors, and the power switch. The way to tell it "you have plenty of toner; stop whinging and print my document" is to powercycle with the upper door open and the button down, wait, push the button exactly five times, wait, and powercycle with the door closed. Don't you love intuitive interfaces?

In most ways, I'm very pleased with NCBI. But their organization scheme for raw data into "projects", "biosamples", "samples", "experiments", and "runs", collectively called "accessions" (a word I never expected to see outside of Cats) could use a lot of work. Does anyone feel like inventing the field of Bioinformatical Library Science? You might get to set new records in how many departments your courses are crosslisted among.

Now with 50% less vagueness

Reread Paul Graham's Is It Worth It To Be Wise?. I disagree with his definition of wisdom. I think wisdom is being able to apply cognitive lessons without prompting.

The classic example is that intelligence is understanding why a tomato is a fruit and wisdom is leaving it out of your fruit salad anyway. In this case, understanding that words are leaky abstractions is intelligence, but wisdom is pausing to ask "what does 'fruit' mean *in this context*?" when you're asked for a fruit salad and you've never heard of one before.

(Common sense is having eaten enough fruit salads that you can make a tasty one by copying others without understanding anything.)

Wisdom is associated with calmness and self-control. Putting yourself in someone else's shoes requires intelligence -- doing it while angry requires wisdom.

What of Graham's concept that wisdom is general? It does seem like one of the most general talents one might have: applicable to almost any hard problem. The real question is when is intelligence without wisdom sufficient. The answer is when there are prompts. This explains why intelligence dominates in a classroom, where the teacher always prompts for the relevant skill. It also explains why intelligence alone is so good in a narrow field with lots of practice: one's own experience can serve as the prompt.

Graham suggests that wisdom is elusive because it's not one thing. My definition suggests that it is one thing -- but leaves pretty vague how one acquires it.

Continuing to reread Paul Graham, stumbled upon:

> One way to guess how far an idea extends is to ask yourself at what point you'd bet against it. The thought of betting against benevolence is alarming in the same way as saying that something is technically impossible. You're just asking to be made a fool of, because these are such powerful forces.

Long before Scott started writing about Elua. Encouraging.

Updated Dec 17, 2014 9:51:10pm

The latest slatestarcodex observes:

> [If everyone] gives ten percent of their income to charity... the first year would give us enough to solve global poverty, eliminate all treatable diseases, fund research into the untreatable ones for approximately the next forever, educate anybody who needs educating, feed anybody who needs feeding, fund an unparalleled renaissance in the arts...
>
> (by contrast, if everybody in the world retweeted the latest hashtag campaign, Twitter would break.)

And if everyone applied their knowledge of information theory to a randomly chosen disease... the vast majority would be wasting their time. Universalizability is *hard*.

Saw the third Hobbit movie. Thoughts (no spoilers assuming you've read the books)...

Yay:

Overall pacing: could easily have gotten bogged down, but didn't

Legolas's fight scenes: Over-the-top? yes. Worth it? yes.

The battle of Dol Goldur. I was really expecting that to get messed up, but they made a mix of physical and mental combat that really worked.

Smaug frying Lake-town. That really put his threat level back up where it belongs.

Thorin's ice fight: cross-class ranks in knowledge(architecture and engineering) for the win.

Bard: everything about him.

Thranduil: a credibly morally ambiguous figure.

Bilbo getting home and finding a monogrammed hankerchief.

Boo:

The plot structure. It's left pretty vague whether all those dramatic duels actually affected the battle.

Sandworms. Those live on Arrakis, not Arda.

Bard's improvised bow. That's not how bows work.

Thorin's character arc: a good idea but heavy-handed and clumsy in execution.

Short version: In EA, it makes sense to work on things that you're particularly suited to, but that's particularly *in comparison to the rest of the EA community*, not in comparison to humanity at large. Important tasks are going undone because everyone thinks someone else would be better.

This seems like a genuinely hard problem. But perhaps solvable...

Updated Dec 28, 2014 3:09:21am

I'm not sure how this applies to me right now, but the general concept has certainly applied to me in the past, and probably applies to a lot of people I know.

Updated Jan 01, 2015 1:31:37pm

My laptop just died. "Fan Error". I opened it up and cleaned the fan, but that didn't help (there wasn't much gunk -- I was surprised). My feeling is that buying a replacement fan is a bad plan at this point, and that I should just buy a replacement laptop. I know I want linux over x64, and I'm tentatively inclined to spend about $300. It's been a while since I've really paid attention to this. Any advice?

Columbia has both a department of "Biomedical and Electrical Engineering" and a department of "Electrical Engineering: Biomedical". Naturally, the course catalogue is ordered alphabetically by department.

And the moral of the story is: refrain from cabbages; they only lead to suffering.

The anti-doomsday argument: there are far more people in timelines where humanity does not face an early demise than in those in which it does. Therefore, apart from all evidence, you should expect yourself to be in a nondoomed timeline. When this argument meets the doomsday argument, they precisely cancel, leaving you with your nonanthropic credence.

One more doomsday thought: I wonder what the graph of (human number since Mitochondrial Eve) against (human number since whatever that human regards as the first human) looks like. Presumably slope 1 except where it jumps downward, but if you smooth it, what's the overall slope? Are we always going to be the 100 billionth humans?

To clarify the point I tried to make at today's meetup...

Imagine you are the supreme ruler, and before you are brought 10 killers. You have two options: execute them or spare them. If you spare them, you can predict that 5 more murders will take place (because people will know they have a chance to get away with murder). What do you do?

(The hypothetical is simplified to make the decision clearer. Feel free to add uncertainty, and make these predictions expected. Likewise, feel free to add lesser penalties and lesser crimes, and talk about suffering instead of death. When you finish adjusting, you'll land in the same place.)

If your answer is to spare them, because 10 lives are more valuable than 5 lives, then you may be a straightforward utilitarian and can safely ignore free will. But very few people give that answer. If you execute them, reasoning that 5 innocent lives have more value than 10 guilty ones, read on.

Now the killers present mitigating factors. They never chose to kill anyone. A freak tornado picked them up and threw them into a crowd, where their heads collided with their victims'. The security footage confirms this. Surely that makes them innocent, and their lives are as valuable as the other 5, and you release them.

No wait, it wasn't a tornado. A mad scientist (already dead) implanted computer chips in their spines and operated them like puppets.

No wait, it wasn't their spines, it was their dopaminergic centers. He addicted them to following his orders.

No wait, there were no chips. He just stuck them in Skinner boxes and operantly conditioned them to kill.

No wait, there was no mad scientist, just really terrible parents who raised them to be filled with unmanageable hatred.

No wait, it was ordinary parents, and a fairly ordinary life, but you can still track how the events of the killers' childhoods led them inevitably to this result by simple causality of physical systems.

No wait, you can't see that, but you live in a material universe, where everything is made of atoms and atoms follow simple laws, so what they did *was* caused by their life experiences up to that point.

Which puts us back where we started.

You could reject materialism, but it seems pretty well established. You could condemn them in every case, but that's pretty clearly evil in the aftermath of the tornado. You could simply accept inconsistent decisions, causing people to live or die based on what happened to cross your mind immediately before sentencing them, but that seems an undesirable property.

You could reject the concept of guilt: spare all the cases. Adopt the "straightforward utilitarianism" from earlier. This is coherent, and your empire will be pleasant to live in, but it can be rather counter-intuitive.

Or you could draw a line between two of the scenarios. Say "this one counts" but "that one doesn't".

You don't have to draw a completely sharp boundary. You could say, "that scenario leaves them a little guilty, so I would execute them to save 9, but if I predict only 5 murders will result from sparing them, I will spare them."

But even allowing a smooth gradient, it's hard to find a basis on which to draw it. These scenarios don't look that *fundamentally* different.

This, in my opinion, is the Interesting Question of Free Will. I don't have an answer.

Does anyone have a sense of how reasonable it is to model systemic inflammation as a scalar? People keep talking that way, and I'm wondering if I should be wary.

Ocean density doesn't increase much with depth, but when you're dealing with a bowling ball that isn't all that much denser that water to begin with, the effect gets amplified. I think.

The feeling when you try to make a map and you reach for tape and scissors...

The feeling when even that doesn't work...

Achievement Unlocked: used p values to figure out which features were relevant in a pure meta and it worked.

Ermahgerd! The four seahorsemen of the seapocalypse are coming! Alert Professor X, Malcolm X and the X Prize Foundation! Fire the Sardine Cannons! Activate the Immortal Iron Hull!

To actually be clear: we completed hunt, most emphatically not first. It was a good hunt, with many fun and interesting mechanics. Post-hunt discussion about possibly winning some day keeps drifting more positive.

The épée pen is mightier than the saber tooth tiger.

TIL Sharks make very comfortable pillows.

Yesterday, I contributed a series of computer scientists to Scott's "walk into a Starbucks" joke collection. Today, Eric Raymond added himself to the list.

Updated Jan 27, 2015 2:27:09am

I am *finally* officially registered for my classes. That was way too much work. I love both the teachers and the students here at Columbia, but I kind of wish I could import U Maryland's bureaucracy to run the place.

x-post from the latest SSC open thread

(Background for those who missed it the first time around: PETA offered to pay the water bills of Detroit residents who were about to get service shut off on the condition that those residents adopt pure veganism. Most spectators felt this was wrong, but did not offer to pay the bills themselves.)

I was thinking again about the PETA water bills thing, and found that it actually did make some sense.

Consider the following timeless platonic contract:

> If I ever find myself in a position of offering a deal to which no counter-offer is practical (something equivalent to an ultimatum game) I will make an offer as if from behind a vale of ignorance. I will do this regardless of how I got into that position. In return, you will do the same.

That sounds like a contract a lot of us would ratify. I see no terrible consequences of universalizing it. I also note that we have a word for violating this contract: “exploitation”.

Alternative, consider this contract:

> If I ever find myself in possession of a resource, I will calculate a distribution of resources as if from behind a vale of ignorance. If I possess more than my calculation, I will give the excess to whomever is most shortchanged. I will do this regardless of how I acquired the resource. In return, you will do the same.

I think most of us would not ratify that contract. The prospect of being unable to ever deliberately acquire more resources seems a bit daunting.

From this perspective, we can see PETA as in violation of a platonic contract, whereas the people who simply refused to pay a random stranger’s water bill are not.

I’m not entirely convinced of contractualism, but it does seem to put this intuition on a much sounder footing.

Concept: antisignalling: deliberately failing to give the cheapest signals of respectability in one culture to give up any place there as an expensive signal of commitment to an enemy culture. Not to be confused with countersignalling.

When a straight man puts a photo of himself in a dress at the top of an online dating profile, it's probably antisignalling. It says, "you don't have to worry about me trying to force our relationship into some standard gendernormative script to win points with that community because I have burned my bridges with that community."

When a nerd disrespects the superbowl or claims implausible ignorance of it, it's the same thing. "You don't have to worry about my pushing you down or abandoning you to claim a higher status in sports fandom because *I have burned that bridge in chlorine trifluoride*."

More minimetafanfic

Updated Jan 30, 2015 3:03:48pm

That feeling when you realize you're trying to create a canonical ordering for events that are literally outside of each-other's light cones.

#DistributedSystemProblems

If you register for Matlab using an email address with a + in it, you have to manually change the + to a %2B in the verification URL. This appears to be the only way to install Matlab on a second laptop without getting a second email address.

And the moral of the story is: put your trust in root vegetables

I think there's something wrong with my weather app. Predicted low: 18F. Current temperature: 9F.

GPU computing homework... Spent more time writing a parser for the input file than on the actual substance of the assignment. C++ is not noted for its text parsing tools.

Is it just me, or is /r/hpmor *too crowded* to be an effective discussion and brainstorming forum?

My ending to HPMOR
--------------------------

Harry tried talking. He argued that the world was safer with him as a guardian than without it. He pointed out that prophecies were confusing things. He offered to help resurrect Salazar and Merlin. Voldemort wasn't impressed.

But as he spoke, he was transfiguring. His wand was pointed at the ground and his bare foot was touching it. Soon a ring of the rock around his feet wasn't rock anymore. Then the hard part. The second transfiguration was just to make it bigger, but the shaping was the important part. Keeping the path in his head while he said sufficiently interesting things to hold Voldemort's attention...

And when it wasn't getting any better he let it go. The ring of carbon nanotubes expanded rapidly at waist height. Even looking for it, Harry could barely see a thing. Beneath the moonlight glinted a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line.

It passed through the death eaters without slowing, and for a moment Harry thought without effect. Then the Death Eaters began to crumble (black robes falling) and blood spilled out in litres. Someone screamed.

And Harry realized that he was the one screaming. Driving his transfiguration through Voldemort's body had set off their resonance. But he wasn't dead, and with any luck Voldemort was hit harder. He couldn't stand, but he crawled fast.

He gathered his gear, including the all important time turner, and then grabbed the Stone and Map on general principles. He wished he could take Hermione, but the enchantments were set against that. He flipped the time turner.

He couldn't.

Anti-time wards. In which case there were also probably anti-apparition and anti-portkey wards. Harry needed to get out of those before Voldemort possessed a new body and caught him. How long did that take? He had no idea.

But the information wouldn't change his plans anyway. He stood up, wrapped himself in the Cloak and ran for the edge of the graveyard. Was it his imagination that he felt something when he crossed the border? Maybe, but it cost nothing to check. He flipped the time turner.

Harry paused to catch his breath. For almost the next hour, Voldemort would be securely in a body. If he could find and destroy the resurrection stone in that time, he'd be safe.

He had no idea where to start.

“What was I saying about us not being up to this?” his Hufflepuff side asked.

“Good point,” Harry said.

*I am still going to save everyone.*

*I am going to save everyone with help from my friends.*

EXPACTO PATRONUM

“Go to Dumbledore. Not the one in the mirror. Tell him everything's at stake and I need him now.”

The patronus went.

Harry pulled on his clothing, then transfigured his shirt and slacks into kevlar and made it permanent with the Stone. As long as guns were in play, he wanted every advantage. He left his robe alone.

As he finished, Dumbledore appeared in a flash of phoenix-fire. “What's happening?”

“In a little less than an hour, Voldemort will steal the Stone and break free. I'll discorporate him, but that won't hold him long unless we can get the resurrection stone first. And he's decided to stop playing around like he did in the last war.”

“And me?” Dumbledore asked.

Harry looked down. He hadn't anticipated that question. He really should have.

“I'm dead, amn't I?” Dumbledore said.

Harry nodded.

“Then I'd better make the best use of the time I have. Tell me everything; I'll obliviate myself later.”

“That works?”

“So long as I decide to do it now.”

“I'm not sure I have time to tell you *everything*.”

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” Harry said, and was surprised to discover he meant it.

“Then drop your shields and look me in the eye.”

Harry relived the past few hours all at once. The concentrated emotion nearly overwhelmed him. Had Dumbledore spoken a single word of blame, or even of forgiveness, he likely would have curled into a ball right there.

But the old man did neither. He pondered a moment and spoke: “I believe we're going to want Miss Granger with us on this quest,” and he silently shot off a patronus message.

A moment later Amelia Bones appeared in the clearing, her time turner looped around both her own neck and Hermione's. Harry was pretty sure his time turner couldn't do that. Apparently there were perquisites to being head of DMLE.

Dumbledore shared a heavy glance with both of them. Amelia nodded grimly, while Hermione seemed to shudder.

“One hour to find and destroy the resurrection stone?” Amelia said, “It's been lost for centuries. And now You-Know-Who has gotten it more lost?

Then Hermione spoke. She spoke slowly, softly, almost idlely. As if she'd gone past panic and straight out the other side.

“You know, I'd always wondered why unicorns were classified as major magical creatures. They don't seem to do very much. But the senses... Headmaster, you're a virgin?”

“Yes. I fell in love once, in my youth, unwisely. Ten million people died. In my head I know it wasn't really my fault, but I've never really been able to open my heart since.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, and turning to Bones, “And you're --”

“None of your business,” Bones snapped.

“Of course. But my new senses are good for more than that. I can feel the horcruxes. They're dirty. Corrupt. Twisted. They're like bruises in my mind.”

“We need the one that's a deathly hallow. It might feel kind of like this cloak,” Harry said.

“Or this wand,” Dumbledore added.

Bones looked at them in shock. Hermione only concentrated.

“Got it,” she said. “But we've got incoming. Feels like he wasn't depending on the stone. He also set horcruxes on people with access to time turners. Looks like I can't catch all of those in time. They're here, and they're coming for the two of you. I guess it's up to me to get the stone.”

“It'll be guarded by deadly traps,” Dumbledore warned.

“Deadly to a mountain troll / unicorn hybrid? I doubt it. Fort up wherever you can. I'll handle this.”

“How will you even get --” Harry started to ask, but a phoenix appeared on her shoulder and she was gone.

“I'll go summon the cavalry,” Bones said, and disapparated.

Harry turned to Dumbledore, “Does this mean the 'power the Dark Lord knows not' was just being friends with Hermione?”

“It *is* completely beyond his comprehension.”

* * *

Aftermath:

“I would like to state for the record that it is after the Ides of May. Also, he bit me first. Furthermore, he had poisonous fangs at the time.”

* * *

Further Aftermath

Harry tweaked the wormhole generator one more time. Dumbledore stepped out.

“I knew you would get me. How long has it been? What have I missed?”

“About fifty years. There are some new flavors of candy.”

* * *

Even Further Aftermath

Pulling Atlantis back into the timestream was going to require a lot more energy than Harry could lay hands on through normal sources. He felt a little guilty about just taking what he needed, but it wasn't like anyone was really *using* Vega or Rigel...

My actual MoR prediction (before it's too late) is that there will be extensive talking, but ultimately it will come down to a fight (those two spirits cannot exist in the same world). The nanowire trick will be used, as will the time turner.

Resharing because I think a bunch of my friends will be interested.

It says "by Andrew Rettek" because he created the gofundme page. @[1111123:2048:Sarah Constantin] is the one doing the research. She's awesome. I can think of very few people or institutions I would trust more when it comes to this sort of research.

Updated Mar 03, 2015 11:00:50pm

Interesting observation: if I take a chain of shiny beads and swing it in front of my projector, I see discrete stripes of red, green, blue and white. It must have four light sources and cycle through putting each onto the wall. It's fast enough that I don't see any flicker.

Spirit Airlines has now made grammar in their communications an optional additional purchase.

Feedly happened to put a Phil Plait article immediately after an Ozymandias article. I misread "aromatic hydrocarbons" as "aromantic hydrocarbons" and got very confused.

Paxos is a confusing algorithm. I depended on it for years, and never learned it. I read the paper on it, and I didn't understand it. I went to class on it and still didn't really get it. Next trick: explaining it to someone else. Lacking a victim, I created a slide deck. And, you know? I think I understand it now.

Here's the slide deck, if any of you want it. I can't promise you'll find it useful. I mostly wrote it for myself.

Updated Mar 09, 2015 3:21:27pm

The author's notes for MoR 119 include a suggestion of:

> Assaults on obesity that involve directly killing fat cells, rather than futile attempts to mess with the surrounding metabolic processes.

My impression is that excess fat is only one symptom of obesity, and probably not the one that causes the various health issues, so this would be a bad idea. A very quick survey of the liposuction literature is inconclusive. Would anyone more knowledgeable care to comment?

Apparently an unfriendly program *can* get out of a box by identifying the physical substrate that corresponds to its mind and dropping an anvil on it.

Updated Mar 11, 2015 10:48:59am

It is said that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken. Farewell Sir Terry. Your name will be spoken for a long, long time.

Ages ago, I read a webcomic that seems to have since vanished from the internet. In one strip, an alien is trying to understand human society. It goes something like this:

Part of the problem is that the three of us aren't popular students -- we're just nerds.
What are nerds?
People who are interested in things they're not supposed to be interested in. Like physics.
Or math.
Or the history of poetry.
What are you supposed to be interested in?
Sports.
Babies.
How does your civilization ever achieve anything?!
Nerds.

I think of this whenever I see people complaining about how nerdy ideas about actually making a difference in the world ruined their virtue-ethics-wireheading.

In case anyone is wondering where I disappeared to: I have a nasty cold and have quarantined myself for the duration.

I don't link to slatestarcodex articles because I assume everyone else has already read them. But I don't think the same is true of slatestarscratchpad, and this one seemed worth spreading.

His examples are very blue, but the phenomenon isn't. For some entertaining red-tinged sneering, see Larry Correia's blog.

Ironically, the best weapon I can think of against sneer culture is sneering. Would that be doing it wrong?

Updated Mar 18, 2015 9:15:42pm

I think the biggest disconnect between blue and grey cultures is about having money.

From a blue perspective, money is basically outside of personal control. Some people are rich. Some are poor. Changing that -- even on an individual level -- requires extraordinary measures. What matters is what you choose to do with the class in which you find yourself.

From a grey perspective, money is basically inside of personal control. Yes, some people start with advantages, but the biggest factor is choices. Life is full of tradeoffs. Money can be traded off against basically anything. Different people make different choices regarding those tradeoffs and all of the options are respectable. If someone doesn't like the choice they've made, they can go back and change it. It is perfectly valid to say "I didn't bother with money before, but now my plans require some so I'd better go make a bunch" or "I've made lots of money and it isn't getting me what I want, so I'll go do something else now".

I'm not defending *either* perspective. They *both* sweep a ton of important stuff under the rug.

But if someone with one perspective says something about money, and someone with the other hears it, they're not likely to communicate. And that's something we should be better at.

Rough drafts of two stories that might be told at a rationalist seder:

**The Story of the Story of Passover**

The story we just told is very old. It was told orally for centuries, then written down, then retold more precisely for even more centuries. There are no surviving competing accounts, but some of the pieces still sound a little implausible.

At first we believed the story. It was the only story. What else would we do?

Then we invented skepticism, guessed that the story never happened, and cast it aside.

Then we invented anthropology, and picked the story up again to try to understand the people who told it in the first place.

Then we invented memetics, and realized the more interesting question is why this story kept getting retold while almost all others from that age are forgotten.

Who knows what we’ll invent tomorrow?

**A Story about War**

Two tribes live next to each other. Each fears the other will attack, and so builds weapons to hold in readiness. And then, seeing that the other has built weapons, builds more weapons. Their clothes are threadbare. Their children are hungry. But still they spend their time making weapons, lest the other tribe build more. They would prefer to live in peace, and make no weapons, but whichever tribe adopted that policy first would surely be killed.

Are these tribes free? There is no pharoah putting the whip to their backs, but still they do not live as they choose.

In the next valley, there are two more tribes. They distrust each other as much as the first two, but they are ruled by a powerful empire. The empire forbids tribes to fight each other, and enforces that rule with unstoppable legions. And so these two tribes have the peace and prosperity that the first two tribes wanted.

And in the valley beyond that, there are two more tribes, who only think they are ruled by a powerful empire. The empire has long since collapsed, but they still believe that if they fight, the empire will come and punish them. And so they don’t fight. And so their belief is technically true. And they too, live in peace and prosperity.

That is the power of a story.

They also pay taxes to the empire, by floating valuable timber down a river from which no one will collect it. That too, is the power of a story.

And in a farther, more distant valley are two tribes who really understand timeless decision theory. They should publish a paper or something.

Several times today I saw someone with a frond and thought "it's not sukkot, is it?" So close...

Generally a disappointing crop this year. A few good ones: Nature, CERN, W3C and EFF

Looking forward to celebrating April Magician's day tomorrow

It may be a toy problem, but it's new ground in performance visualation

I spent roughly 11pm to 5am last night being "about an hour away" from getting my project working. But at least I did get it working.

No longer restricted to toy problems

Perf's stack tracing often dead-ends in libc. I tried --call-graph dwarf and it didn't help. I tried recompiling libc -O1 --fno-omit-frame-pointer and that didn't help. I tried to work around the problem by putting a userspace trace right below the failure point. That worked for some things, but perf refuses to probe weak symbols. Why does libc even use weak symbols? Now I'm recompiling libc with poll as a strong symbol. I don't know what this will break, so I plan to only install the -dbg deb.

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

Byzantine down, next up, Consta^H^H^H^H^H^H The Profiler

Profiler down. Pretty good presentation. Doing demos on a projection screen using a mouse facing the opposite direction is hard, but I had enough redundancy planning to cope. Up next: GPU.

I poked my head up briefly from classwork and saw my feed filled with discussion of tactics in resisting oppression, mostly in the context of Baltimore. Frighteningly one-sided discussion. When None Dare Urge Restraint applies.

For what it's worth, my object-level guess is that what's actually happening in Baltimore is reasonable but ineffective, what's getting reported would be too much if it actually happened, and what my facebook feed encourages would burn the world to ash.

But the more interesting question is what *should* be done. I'd love to see someone try a historical analysis. Selection bias is the enemy, so the first step is to make a list of groups that were oppressed a hundred years ago, *then* see how they're doing now, and *then* ask how the ones who are doing better got that way.

Off the top of my head, in the United States, the Irish and Chinese triumphed through sheer normality, gays needed Stonewall but mostly won through normality afterwards, and blacks played history's largest game of good-cop bad-cop. I don't understand the story with Jews.

But that's off the top of my head. I'd love to see something more careful.

All this assumes that Baltimore is fundamentally about race, and not about police. That assumption probably owes more to memetics than truth. The change of police from alpha chimps to agents of law was even more complicated. It's the sort of thing I would expect to require guillotines and rivers of blood, but I'm not sure that's the actual history. And this time we have a nominative representative democracy, which may offer additional options. Another task for historians.

Well, break time's over. Back to the code mines.

Updated Apr 28, 2015 6:35:01pm

Aparently the key to facial recognition is to memorize 100 or so eigenfaces and project faces you see onto them *in pixelspace*. I am skeptical that this is the algorithm people who are good at it use.

GPU down. Project did not go well, but found things to say and professor and classmates were sympathetic. Next up, distributed systems.

It has occurred to me that I'm something of a paranoid control freak, and that perhaps this is not the ideal nature.

So I decided to step back on one of my three projects, let my partner make the big decisions, and provide support. This is the one of my three projects that ended with a frowny face for a results section.

I was thinking... about... reforming.

Guess not.

Distributed systems presentation went well. Now all that's left is the written reports.

Odd: there was a time when writing 25 pages worth of reports would have seemed like a big task.

Interesting thing I heard tonight from a source worth taking seriously:

" There is no thing as an egalitarian relationship. There are relationships in which the power dynamics and domains work and those in which they don't, and there are relationships in which they are open and in which they are hidden, but they're always there. "

Not sure if I agree. I think there's something missing. Probably having to do with shared or merged goals. But certainly interesting.

Achievement unlocked: wrote a footnote citing a paper I intend to write next week.

In case anyone's wondering what I've been going crazy over lately, here's part of it: http://dspeyer.dyndns.org/RSP.pdf

Updated May 07, 2015 7:08:02pm

And done!

http://dspeyer.dyndns.org/spatialtable.pdf

Interesting article on the "calories in" side of the equation.

Updated May 17, 2015 1:08:49pm

Relevant to our interests

Updated May 20, 2015 12:11:03pm

And an AMA from the author

Updated May 20, 2015 12:13:56pm

I came across a claim that martial arts are a poor metaphor for rationality in part because martial arts are inherently individual and rationality is best done collaboratively. This is a good point, but it got me thinking in an unrelated direction:

Why don't we have collaborative martial arts? Throughout history, most real violence has been many-on-many, and yet every martial art I know of is entirely individual. Phalanxes were more instrumental in shaping history than ninjas, yet ninjutsu is alive and phalanxfu is so dead I had to make up a name for it.

The art of fighting as a team should have as much room for complexity and skill as fighting alone, shouldn't it?

Or is this out there and I've missed it?

My air conditioner has spikes

Jumping off Brienne's worst case scenario thinking, I started contemplating an entity that maximized not mere suffering but total dysdaemonia. Then I wondered if anyone else actually uses that word. The answer is yes, but the philosophers are outnumbered by the entomologists. Somebody named a genus of moth "Dysdaemonia".

What could the poor creature possibly have done to deserve a name like that?

According to the Doctors Without Borders 2013 annual report, in the Central African Republic they treated 600 thousand people for only 8 million dollars. This is *in addition* to providing "clean drinking water and hygiene services" to refuge camps (out of the same budget). Conditions treated included "wounds, malaria respiratory and skin infections, diarrheal diseases and malnutrtion", all of which sound quite serious. They don't give a breakdown, but I'm guessing malnutrition was the most common. If a civilian population has to walk for days to reach a refugee camp without time to gather supplies, malnutrition is a given, while disease is only a possibility. Also, it's the only way to make the numbers make sense. Because assuming all the sanitation work is free, this works out to $13 per treatment.

These are serious conditions. Furthermore, once the immediate medical needs are met and either the civil war dies down or the refugees are safely placed in Gabon or someplace, these people have a reasonable chance of living to old age.

I know we don't have the sort of precision we'd like, but this seems to be beating Givewell's best numbers by *a lot*.

Some of the treated people will die anyway, or would have lived without the treatment. Maybe some of those people were actually the same people as before receiving follow-up care with poor paperwork. It's possible this was an atypically efficient operation for them (though I picked it pretty much at random). But it's hard to see how this adds up to a factor of 100. And that's ignoring the power of installing sanitation in refugee camps, which is hard to measure but huge.

Now MSF depends a lot on volunteer labor. Presumably there is an amount of money such that if they received it they wouldn't be able to use it as effectively because they didn't have the volunteers to pair it with. But I don't think they're there yet.

This shouldn't surprise us that much. We already look to the third world because a dollar does more when starting conditions are worse. What's worse than the conditions in the third world? Conditions in the third world in the middle of a civil war. The same logic applies. Also, there's the volunteer labor thing. If a dollar I give unlocks hundreds of dollars' worth of volunteer labor that would otherwise be told "sorry, we don't have a place for you", that's a huge multiplier.

Am I missing something big? If not, this seems important.

Reading The Concrete Jungle on a closed-source ebook reader on a smartphone with a front-facing camera

Investigating boston/hyannis transportation options for this summer... AFAICT, the Cape "Flyer" is a train that runs once a day and the P&B "Railway" is a bus. It's also possible, though expensive and awkwardly-timed, to fly. None of the airlines have "bus" in their name, from which I deduce there must be a fourth option.

Ages ago, Charles Stross held a contest for the most amusing disciplinary note inside The Laundry. It's far too late for me to enter, so I'll just post here.

While editing a memo requiring ISO 9000 compliance to require ISO 9660 compliance is just barely within good taste for an April Fools' joke, doing so on geased stationary is not. Correcting the extremely rigid new organizational structure may take some time.

This morning I woke suddenly out of a nightmare and had two streams of consciousness going. They communicated using words, addressed each other as "you" and debated which of my recent experiences were real and which were dreams. When one of them realized it was a lot less in-sync with reality, it self-terminated freeing resources for the other. It did write all its experiences to memory (some of which then got wiped by my over-aggressive dream-cleanup, but that's a separate issue).

Does everybody's brain work like this?

Reductobulversim: ignoring both someone's argument *and* the psychology you guess caused it to focus instead on the *neurology* that you guess caused that. Oddly, seems less rude than regular bulverism. I've only resorted to it once, under extreme provocation, and I didn't publish, but I still feel somewhat guilty about it.

Are being "up for" something and being "down for" it exactly the same?

I took classes in Spanish from 1992 to 2000. As best I can recall, all of my teachers maintained that ch and ll were their own letters for alphabetization purposes. So, for example, "chocolate" would come after "cinco". Today I learned that the Royal Academy of Spain condemned the practice in 1994. Were my teachers behind the times? Were they all Hugo Chavez sympathizers?

I keep seeing ads for the TV show HUM∀NS with the tagline "Made in our image; out of our control." According to wikipedia, it's about humans creating humanoform AIs. I think it might be better if set among the gods, with one mad scientist planning to create humanity and the others insisting (correctly?) that this will destroy everything.

Everything actually worth saying about marriage equality and the way we got it has already been said, so I'll just offer this link for your collective amusement.

http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2010/images/si_1871_large.png

Context:

http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2010/puzzles/2010/banner_headline/

Updated Jun 27, 2015 1:42:11am

I'm sad I missed pride this year. Those who went: any fun stories?

From the FSF's amicus brief opposing the supreme court hearing Oracle vs Google:

> Even if that code contained copyrightable matter, it is undisputed that petitioner could have copied, modified and redistributed all that material, royalty free, under the terms of amicus Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License, version 2, the world’s most widely-used free software copyright license, under which Respondent Oracle offers the entirety of its Java programming language, Standard Edition product. Because, regardless of the disposition of this matter, Petitioner Google can make entire royalty-free use of the material whose copyright, if any, was allegedly infringed (and was at all relevant times validly so licensed), the dispute between the parties is merely theoretical, without practical consequences in the resolution of any actual case or controversy, and a grant of certiorari would be inappropriate on prudential grounds.

Interesting...

It is now possible to fly out of Lancaster, so long as you fly to Dulles. Flying out of Dulles is surprisingly limited. And making the Dulles->National change looks harder than the Amtrak->Airport change in Philadelphia.

Transportation. It almost works.

I'm looking for a little transit help. I'm considering arriving in Philadelphia by Amtrak at 2:55, taking SEPTA to the airport 3:05-3:20 and making a 4:15 flight. Can anybody who knows Philadelphia advise whether those connections are reasonable?

I'm contemplating hosting some sort of pre-WBC boardgaming party, probably on saturday the 25th. Who would be interested?

As a general principle, giving an argument a name that contains the word "fallacy" does *not* constitute rebutting it.

I'm hearing a lot of people calling the Ashley Madison breakin inevitable, and saying that anyone who put real PII there was a fool. I don't think that message would be so unanimous if it were a site we approved of. Horns bias. Beware.

(I also see lots of people snarking about betrayal. Fair enough.)

Nitrogen glaciation -- apparently a thing.

Makes you reconsider previous handwaves about "can't be erosion", doesn't it?

I'm not endorsing the following quote (though the original did have solid footnotes, so I daresay the specific facts are true), I just found it interesting:

> Obama is even further to the right than even conservative hero Ronald Reagan on immigration, having deported more immigrants than any other president in history, while Reagan granted amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants. Obama is also more hawkish than Reagan on foreign policy, as seven predominantly Muslim countries have been bombed without Congressional approval under his administration (Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia). Even on the economy, Obama has proven to be far friendlier to the corporate establishment than Reagan, presiding over record quarterly profits and multiple record high stock market closings while wages have simultaneously hit their lowest point in 65 years.

Mostly I'm updating toward the idea that "left" and "right" are not a useful way to look at politics.

Moments from the final adventure of our D&D campaign:

Pre-battle pep talk:
> A day may come when the courage of men fails. This is that day. It will fail in the face of us.
(And we're the good guys)

Athena (our ally) is fighting Ra (our enemy) and losing. She has a vorpal sword, but it isn't doing her a lot of good. I polymorph into something big (we're ok with vague polymorphs) and grapple and pin Ra. Athena coup-de-gras and takes his head clean off his body.
Me: I eat the corpse
DM: The head or the body?
Me: I still have a haste spell active

Our monk has the ability to deflect projectiles back at their sender. I think the ability is called "deflect arrows" or something like that. It also applies to crossbow bolts or thrown knives or similar things. But hardly anybody shoots at us. Then Hercules throws Horus at him and he throws him right back. So I guess the ability should be called "deflect gods".

Somebody on facebook (whom of course I can no longer find) asked what it meant for Against Malaria Foundation to be unable to use more money. I think I understand now. If you think it likely that I saw the question because you liked or commented on it, please send this back.

They don't do their own distribution. They purchase nets and give them in bulk to organizations like Concern Universal and African Children's Development Trust. I think these are organizations that are going to malaria-stricken areas anyway, so they can distribute nets in addition to whatever originally brought them there. AMF has grown very fast in the past few years, and they can wind up in a situation where they have nets but no trusted partner to distribute them. They seem to be getting better at finding partners, though, so this may be a nonissue in the near future.

Open question: should we start donating to CU and ACDT?

Not too bad this year conflict-wise

Achievement Unlocked: won a TTA game using The Kremlin

So if I break down Crohn's disease by type, NOD2 predicts p<0.0013 but if I just look at whether the patient has it or not, it's only p<0.038. Grr.

The connection doesn't completely go away, but this is encouraging. And it's a gram positive bacterium, so yay that.

Summary of the new Ebola vaccine: They took a single surface protein and stuck it on something else. Vaccinated people showed no cases, whereas control showed very few. Still p<.01. Entire study was on one outbreak, so it might not protect against all strains. Still really good news.

Updated Aug 01, 2015 12:27:15am

Detailed, well researched, highly simulationist war games set during WWII are to be expected. Similar games during WWIII are more disturbing.

Also, the fact that there's a game named Yom Kippur still bugs me.

Bought my SEPTA ticket from a human cashier -- one of three. Did I miss something or is that seriously how Philadelphia sells tickets?

The Cape Air fleet

Does there exist a general factor of taking responsibility for things in one's life?

There now exists a photo of me tangoing

Updated Aug 20, 2015 1:47:19pm

And this is generally what Tango on the Pier looks like

Updated Aug 20, 2015 1:50:04pm

Those of us who stayed to the end

Updated Aug 20, 2015 1:52:35pm

Updated Aug 21, 2015 7:21:42pm

I'm getting conditional mutual informations that are *higher* than the mutual information of the original two variables. Should I be worried?

If you want to see if you understand something, try doing it.

If you want to see if you understand something well, try teaching it to a child.

If you want to see if you understand something completely, try teaching it to a computer.

(Not apropos of anything, just a thought that ran through my head and I decided to share.)

I feel very Bayesian

I don't know where would be a good place to ask this, so I'm throwing it to the facebook hive-mind.

I want to move money from my rarely-used checking account to my often-used one. The obvious move is to write myself a check and deposit it. The problem is that I'm not sure if my checkbook is current. The bank has been acquired since they issued it and I can't remember if they issued me a replacement checkbook or not. I looked around a bit and didn't find one, but that's not very strong evidence.

Does anyone know what happens if I try to deposit a check that turns out to be invalid? Does either bank get really annoyed? Or is it only a little bit annoyed?

If you design rules which are inelegant but "work", you will step on toes you didn't know about. This holds whether you're writing an operating system or a legal system. I am not aware of any exceptions.

(Again, not apropos anything in particular, just a thought that seemed worth sharing)

Quotes which are most entertaining out of context:

> MtG is probably best suited to attractive people, those with good social skills, those who fit in well in high-status and wealthy circles, and women

For going from NYC to Detroit, only two airlines fly direct: Delta, which charges an arm and a leg; and Spirit, which requires chopping off your arms and legs. There's also Air France, Royal Dutch and Virgin Australia, but those are just Delta putting on a different fake accent.

Further afield, Frontier flies direct from Trenton. There's no good train/plane interconnect there, but it might be worth it. Though I hear rumors that Frontier is imitating Spirit, so maybe nevermind.

Just got this syllabus link: this course should be fun

Updated Sep 02, 2015 1:15:11am

So, who's planning to try to de-anonymize the xkcd survey data once it's released?

OK, so your basic bayesian update looks like p(hₓ|e)=p(hₓ)p(e|hₓ)/p(e) where p(e)=Σp(e|hᵢ)p(hᵢ) assuming Σp(hᵢ)=1. Sounds nice and easy. But what if Σp(hᵢ)<1? And it is. You never list *all* the possible hypotheses. Unless hₙ is "something weird is happening", in which case p(e|hₙ) is basically uncalculatable.

The first thought is to handwave p(e|hₙ) as some very small value. Then if all the p(e|hᵢ)s are low enough, you have to start taking hₙ seriously. Maybe you leave the thought at "I am confused" and maybe you go back to hypothesis-generation and think of some new ones.

This doesn't work. There are times when you should *expect* really small p(e|hᵢ)s. For example, if you flip a coin 30 times, the probability of that exact sequence of coin flips will be quite low for any sane h.

One safeguard is that if you realize you've violated conservation of expected evidence, go back and reconsider. This won't catch everything.

A more traditional approach is to replace your observation with the set of all observations that seem like that to you. This is distressingly imprecise and will fall apart if you're operating in a realm without good intuitions: exactly where you want good statistics.

Is there any *good* way around this?

(P.S. Isn't unicode fun? You can almost use math symbols on Facebook!)

I guess I'm an hour or so late in posting this, but happy John Snow Day, everyone. He had a quality I might call *intent to save lives*. Far too many people do not have it, not yet. They hardly shrink from talk of ordinary medicine, but would be shocked at the idea of using maps and water pumps.

Updated Sep 09, 2015 1:00:26am

Does anyone know of any resources that would help me to think intuitively about eigenvectors?

Introductory sentence from a reading assignment:

> We compared genomics with three other major generators of Big Data: astronomy, YouTube, and Twitter

Pandora lists modern composers as "firstname lastname" but classical composers as "lastname, firstname". Modern works in a classical style are reported inconsistently -- even for the same composer writing scores for movies one of which is a direct sequel to the other.

I suppose it only matters if you're messing around with weird client software, which of course I am.

On the other hand, Pandora just introduced me to Edvard Grieg, so I can't actually be mad at it.

It seems there is no way to transfer money from my account at one bank to my account at another faster than a banker could unicycle from one bank's headquarters to the other's with the relevant gold bullion balanced on his head.

I suspect the actual reason is that the delay lets them apply anti-fraud heuristics and contact sender!me if necessary, and that this makes up for the otherwise weak security throughout the banking system. But I *prefer* the unicycle explanation.

On this dark anniversary, let us stand in solidarity with all who are victims of gross political violence, whether that violence comes from ISIS or from the United States or from sources less spoken-of. Let us recognize as Our People all who wish to live together in peace, and stand against those -- human villain and memetic parasite alike -- who would divide us against ourselves in hatred and violence.

Be this our will.

The feeling when you begin to suspect the number you've been approximating as infinity is in fact three

I realize the odds are against it, but if anyone here has influence at a private high school, consider urging them to admit Ahmed Mohamed and offer a full scholarship. He's clearly a top student, and even if his current school ever forgives him for being innocent they'll never be able to teach him properly.

The Efficient Outrage Hypothesis posits that by the time you hear about an injustice on social media, it's probably already a dogpile so the expected value of joining is negative. This isn't proven, but seems broadly true.

There is an important exception: if you can think of something to make the situation better, it's entirely likely that *that* idea hasn't reached saturation.

The habit of seeing a bad thing and thinking about how to make it better seems to be very rare. Rare enough that you could be the first person to try.

I don't know how to make that habit more common, but I can tell people who have it to speak up more.

Just how good a string teacher is Ann Speyer? Here she is teaching a six month old kitten to play the box-with-rubber-band.

Hey, hivemind. Is there a glue that can hold plastic to rubber against 20 lb/in^2 or so of *sideways* force in a wet environment?

From the words-that-should-exist dept.

Lienage is to pride as courage is to fear: not absence, but resistance or mastery. A lienageous person may be very proud, but does not let that get in their way and is fully capable of begging or of tolerating humiliation if it serves their long-term goals.

This seems like a useful ability to develop. Perhaps having a word for it will help.

(Etymology is an abuse of latin and four humors theory)

I was playing with the Open Tree of Life, and it looks like the "we are fish" problem isn't too bad. Our intuitive concept of fish maps pretty well onto Actinopterygii ("ray-finned fishes"). It contains everything I would consider "clearly a fish" and nothing I wouldn't.

The sister-clade Sarcopterygii ("lobe-finned fish") contains coelacanths, lungfish, and the tetrapods. So if we just rename that clade, and say that coelacanths and lungfish are more like weird tetrapods than weird fish (they're weird by any standard) then we have a mostly intuitive cladistic perspective.

This doesn't begin to touch sharks, rays or hagfish, but those really are very different from true bony chordates.

Updated Sep 21, 2015 4:57:26pm

If some messenger were to come to us with the offer that death should be overthrown, but with the one inseparable condition that birth should also cease; if the existing generation were given the chance to live forever, but on the clear understanding that never again would there be a child, or a youth, or first love, never again new persons with new hopes, new ideas, new achievements; ourselves for always and never any others -- what would your answer be?

(Assume that reinstating some form of birth via our own power after taking the deal would be about as difficult -- maybe impossible -- as banishing death by our own power without the deal.)

Amusing moment at services: A congregant began to read from the Torah, then stopped in confusion. The leader of the service looked over, pointed, and said "over here". As she prepared to start over, he commented to the rest of us that "unfortunately, there are a lot of passages in the Torah that begin 'vyomer adonai lmoshe'"

Got a p value of 1. I may have overfit.

Mental tasks I didn't realize I needed instructions on: Avoiding the conclusion that the platypus rules the earth.

Updated Sep 25, 2015 3:06:34pm

Probably best to leave this at just one verse, seeing as I barely know the music *or* the books, but somebody stuck the first line in my head and I had to keep going.

ttto the second verse of Do You Want to Build a Snowman?

So you want to be a wizard?
In life's name and for life's sake.
So maybe you could learn a spell or two
And we could all talk to
the trees down by the lake!
(Thank you, trees)
It gets a little scary:
this long book to read,
while watching the moon grow dim!

A while back, Facebook filled with "Doesn't believe in X, does X-related job anyway" memes. And it felt wrong to me, but I wasn't quite ready to respond.

Thirty-two years ago today, there was a man whose job it was to trigger massive nuclear retaliation at any sign of an attack, even if it was only five missiles (which is what the screens were showing). He didn't believe the enemy would launch such an ineffective surprise assault. Did he do his job anyway?

Hint: you're alive to read this.

That single refusal to do a job was billions of times more important than messing up marriage licenses. When you propose a general principle, at least make some effort to consider all its consequences, and to keep a sense of proportion.

And have a happy Stanislav Petrov day.

In case anyone on here hasn't seen this, and is looking for a way to celebrate Petrov Day.

This is not the One True Way to honor this day, but it's the one that somebody made pdfs for.

Updated Sep 26, 2015 1:12:28pm

It turns out spinning gracefully on one foot is somewhat more difficult in 30mph winds. Who knew?

In related news, seagulls flapping like map to fly upwind and staying exactly where they are look kind of silly.

I took a closer look at that injectable mesh neuroelectronics thing. It does look pretty cool. It uses a very small skull hole, can record individual action potentials, and shows few signs of inflammation.

The article said nothing about staying in place, though. If the mesh moves off a little bit, all the terminals will touch different neurons and any previous analysis will have to be thrown out. This is one of the things that makes current brain interconnects difficult.

Still pretty cool.

Updated Oct 01, 2015 2:08:25am

I'm pretty sure that half of claims involving "society" doing something are fundamentally flawed and not-even-wrong because they botch their layers of abstraction and lose track of whom their talking about. I'm still confused about which half.

My facebook wall is again filling up with gun control arguments. I am pleased to see I have them from both sides, and displeased to see that they are uniformly terrible. (Exception: a few that solely debunk their opposite numbers without presenting any affirmative claim are not terrible.)

Supporters: Make up your mind whether you're talking about spree killings, ordinary crime, accidents or suicide. You can talk about more than one, but applying the logic of one to the numbers of the other is bad and anyone who does it should feel bad. Then come up with a general standard of trading off safety against everything else and justify. The TSA is *not* a defensible standard here: they are stupid and should not be imitated. And you know it.

Opponents: Every claim about guns achieving benefits requires citation. In particular, treating "guns" as a single concept -- with no attention to who is holding them -- is dishonest and cannot produce truth.

Both sides: Read about Researcher Allegiance Confounding. Weep. Keep working anyway.

EAs using this to call attention to Malaria: You're correct, as usual, but consider whether you can and should be kinder.

For general future reference, this is a photo of my board game collection. I'm usually happy to bring anything from it to relevant events.

Ages ago, there was an #overlyhonestmethods post which read "pH of buffer B was adjusted with HCl. then back a bit with NaOH..then a bit more HCl." This is fine so long as you have good pH monitoring and don't care about the buffer's salinity.

This turns out to be a really good metaphor for an awful lot of things.

Slatestarcodex has declared a "reign of terror". We are to "behave accordingly". I'm not sure what to do. Thoughts? Amélia?

It seems that N(μ,σ) can mean a function which takes an entropy source and delivers a real-valued, normally distributed random number, or a function which takes a real number and returns the probability density of that number given a normal distribution. This ambiguity is ok until you start taking linear combinations.

Math! Why you no type-safe?

Considerably less awesome than metacancer, but more encouraging from a non-metaphorical standpoint (i.e. we might actually be able to apply this)

Updated Oct 08, 2015 4:07:24pm

Henoatheism: the belief that there is no god, but there's one particular absence-of-a-god which is the *important* one

I tried to stay out of this.

But now my facebook wall is filling up with people talking about how the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising would not have benefited from better weapons. The people who were *there* spent a ton of time and effort trying to get better weapons. Some people feel entitled to armchair-quarterback them.

If you think there's a specific tactic they should have used differently, feel free to present it with your evidence. But if you want to disrespect their courage, their sacrifice or even their judgment -- go do something comparable first.

Ken Thompson: When in doubt, use brute force.
Obiwan: Use the Force

Not quite the same thing

Does anyone know anything about setting fire to cookies?

(Serious question for reasons that may one day become apparent)

Remember the movie Independence Day? Somebody should make a fan-edit where the aliens win, 95% of humanity dies, civilization collapses and the aliens set up shop permanently. They could call it Columbus Day.

I started imagining there being commemorative tshirts for Solstice. Then I started imagining what they would look like. Then, before I started paying attention, I'd created some images for front and back.

This doesn't often happen to me, but it's fun when it does.

Anyway, I thought I'd share them here. Do the images look good to anyone else? Does the idea of a tshirt sound like a good one?

When people started talking about TPP, it was from a "sketchy people are conspiring in secret: this can't be good" perspective, and some people argued that actually, it could be. Well, maybe it could have been, but FFtF did a first pass through the wikileaks text, and it's not. To quote them:

These are just a few of its most dangerous pieces:

Compel ISPs to take down websites without any sort of court order, just like SOPA. (Appendix Section I)

Extend the US’s copyright regime to require copyrights stand for life plus 70 years, preventing anyone from using works that belong in the public domain. (Article QQ.G.6)

Criminalize whistleblowing by extending trade secrets laws without any mandatory exemptions for whistleblowers or investigative journalists. (QQ.H.8)

End anonymity online by forcing every domain name to be associated with a real name and address. (Article QQ.C.12)

Make it illegal to unlock, modify, or generally tinker with a device you own. (Article QQ.G.10)

Export the US’s broken copyright policies to the rest of the world without expanding any of the free speech protections, like fair use. (Article QQ.G.17)

Ever thought a description of accelerating technology wasn't gripping enough? Maybe it just needed more relatable metaphors:

Back in 1990, sequencing one million nucleotides cost the equivalent of 15 tons of gold ... equivalent to the output of all United States goldmines combined over two weeks. Fast-forward to the present, sequencing one million nucleotides is worth about 30 grams of aluminum. This is approximately the total amount of material needed to wrap five breakfast sandwiches at a New York City food cart.

"DNA sequencing can detect the accumulation of pathogenic microbes in meat, and even predict the ripening time of avocados." #ThingsBiologistsWorkOn

Booted my laptop into Windows to install the MinION control software, logged onto gmail to get the download link, and immediately got an email from Google about suspicious activity. I guess logging in from Windows is weird enough for me that they thought my account might be hijacked.

37 patients' intestines show signs of Anoxybacillus thermarum, a bacterium which is said to grow at temperatures between 55 and 67 C. I blame NCBI.

Maybe it has something to do with Bacillus coagulans? That's closely related, known to live inside humans, and can be pro-inflamatory. It's also known to *relieve* IBS symptoms, whereas what I'm seeing makes them worse. Also, NCBI already has over ten thousand 16S samples for it, so I shouldn't miss it.

Maybe I discovered a new Genus? Oops?

From the "headlines that would be much clearer with the word 'nematode' inserted" department

Updated Oct 17, 2015 3:23:59pm

Achievement unlocked: rejected all hypotheses p<.05

This is a study of dropping 60k refugees into a 347k city. That's a higher ratio than I would have guessed was absorbable. I note that ten years later, the population had only risen to 360k, so there's some homeostasis of total population. I am sad that I can't find year-resolution population data.

I would caution against extrapolating, but interpolating seems valid.

Updated Oct 21, 2015 11:23:39am

Poretools: wanted the banana; got the angry gorilla holding the banana

The halloween themed dance wasn't scary enough, so they turned on the republican primary debate in the background.

If murderers should be locked in jail rather than executed in order to avoid contributing to a culture of violence, should people who lock their victims in small rooms and leave them there to suffer for years be executed immediately for the same reason? I realize it's a much rarer crime, but that doesn't mean it never happens.

I'm kind of ok with this policy, but I'm pretty sure there's a flaw in the logic.

Tonight is the Day of the Dead.

There are many ways to die.

By fire and by water,
by sword and by beast,
by earthquake and by plague...

These are bad ways to die.
And with good reason it is said, death is bad.

But there is one good way to die: by growth.

To grow is to change.
To change is to cease to be what one was.
To cease to be is to die.
When one changes sufficiently, the person one was dies.

Not every change is a growth.
One can also die by decay.
One who begins a change cannot know whether it will be growth or decay. Even in hindsight, there is little clarity.
Death by Change is not safe.

But never to grow is worse.

A story has been told of beings who are absolutely immortal. No matter the circumstance, they cannot die.
And so they cannot grow. Because they might grow into something else, and so die.
Except for one night a year, this night, when everyone is mortal and everything is up for grabs.
One might expect these beings to spend that night huddled in deep, hidden fortresses. But instead they ride to battle. Because the opportunity to grow is worth it.

Even though some do not ride back at all.

There is no safe way to grow.

May this Day of the Dead
bring death
only to those parts of you
that are holding you back.

I'm pretty sure I'm half of the blur on the left

Updated Nov 01, 2015 1:07:18pm

Updated Nov 01, 2015 8:30:04pm

Checked out the upcoming election. Turns out there are no contested races in my district.

So, strange women in ponds distributing swords, how does that work?

I was contemplating *why* the story of Alexander Hamilton was best told through hip-hop, and I was reminded of Asimov's old essay Lost in Non-Translation.

The phrase "Scottish bastard whoreson orphan" has lost almost all of it's vitriol. Even "penniless immigrant" doesn't mean much to a modern ear when applied to a youngster with a law degree from Columbia.

But if you think of Hamilton as the one black guy in the room, this may make a better intuition pump.

(That's using the modern perception of race relations. What Washinton and Jefferson would have actually made of a black Secretary of the Treasury...)

I don't know if this is what Miranda was thinking. Maybe not.

[Link is to the only copy of Lost in Non-Translation I could find online. It's one essay of several, so search for it. Yes, it's probably unauthorized, but I think the ghost of Asimov would approve.]

Updated Nov 05, 2015 2:03:30am

Stop &Shop ground beef probably isn't secretly bighorn sheep. That's probably an NCBI issue. (Though adult domesticated sheep meat is hard to market...)

It probably does have dangerous protists and nematodes. There could be bugs here, but I wouldn't care to eat it raw.

(In related news, my grnomics course I'd fun. Sometimes stressful, but fun.)

Thanks to everyone who left birthday wishes. It really did brighten my day.

Now onward to a new year being a power of two.

It seems I left my dance shoes behind at the hotel this weekend. That's what happens when I pack in a rush, I guess. I've written to the hotel, but I'm not optimistic.

The shoes themselves were pretty beaten up, and I was going to have to replace them soon anyway. But I admit I was hoping to literally wear a hole in them.

Replacing the shoes is proving difficult. The nearby DSW doesn't have anything. They're also *really* annoyingly set up. Shoe stores should be sorted first by *size*, as that's the least flexible requirement. Does it somehow benefit them to be inconvenient? Do they think that someone who spends an hour searching the store will buy more than someone who learned the truth quickly? Are they counting on sunk-cost fallacy to lower customers' standards?

Meanwhile Zappos does not allow search by outsole.

At least blues has a tradition of dancing in socks.

I've been thinking about fizzbuzz.

For those who haven't heard of it, fizzbuzz is by-design the easiest programming puzzle ever. The point is to have a simple-to-apply test that filters out the completely incompetent. Just because someone passes fizzbuzz doesn't mean they're good. It doesn't even mean they're likely to be good. But if they fail it, you can pretty safely reject them with regards to all things programming. And if they struggle with it, that's a very bad sign.

This is valuable because the higher-level skills you really care about can be hard to judge. Am I confused because this proposed algorithm is too brilliant for me or because it is total gibberish? Well, if the author can't fizzbuzz, it's the latter.

This problem generalizes. Does the solution?

I've heard Vitamin D or Bayes Mammogram offered as fizzbuzz for medicine, but neither is really easy enough.

The best application I've found is moral philosophy.

I call this challenge "Camus's Dilemma", though it's cleaned up considerably from it's original formulation. It goes like this. You're walking along the beach on a very sunny day when you see a person in the distance. They're backlit by the sun, so you can't tell anything about them. You're carrying a gun. Do you shoot them? The correct answer is no.

Camus's own absurdism famously fails this. Presumably that's the point, if it has a point.

But most moral philosophies do fine. Consequentialism, contractualism, deontology, common sense and religion all pass easily. Even bioethics can handle a dilemma this easy.

Virtue ethics runs into a little trouble choosing between the Virtue of Mercy and the Virtue of Marksmanship, since it contains no way within it to resolve conflicts of virtues, even silly ones. It copes by invoking common sense. This suggests a deep flaw in virtue ethics: that it only works when common sense also works.

The big failure is teleology. The Purpose of a gun is to shoot people, and to not shoot people once you have a gun is Against Nature.

That seems like an interesting result. Where else could we apply the fizzbuzz concept?

Many people seem convinced that there exists a single population from whose vantage all of society can be perceived accurately, and we need only identify and trust this population.

But any* linear algebraist can tell you that you need log²(n) vantage populations just to get the distortion down to O(log(n)). But you can pick those populations almost at random and succeed with very high probability.

This is what's awesome about machine learning: deep philosophical insights with mathematical rigor.

[*=If you can find a linear algebraist who isn't familiar with this result, I shall shamelessly engage in the no-true-scotsman fallacy.]

Happy birthday!

I almost just read aloud the phrase "My declaring how safe I am is perfectly safe."

On friday the 13th.

I think I'm going to hide under a blanket now.

Happy Birthday!

According to SNPedia, 3% of Han people have G;G rs6138953, but 0% of Chinese people do. I think there are several things wrong here.

I've been thinking about the act of referring to another person as "we".

If some Columbia representative said "Here at Columbia, we are doing exciting things. For example, Columbia grad student Daniel Speyer recently..." I would consider that awesome. (Assume for the moment that I had done something worthy on that scale.). If ESR referred to me as "we hackers", I'd be boasting about it for days. If some appropriate person referred to me as "we engineers", that would be less exciting, but entirely proper.

If a musician or author referred to me as "we" I'd be a little nervous but generally on board. If it were "we scientists", that would make me less nervous, even though I think authors are closer to what I am. If it were "we Jews" that would be nervous-making again, though in a different way.

"We New Yorkers" is OK, so long as it's the city not the state and the speaker is unambiguously a New Yorker themself. Staten Island is pushing it. Hillary Clinton: no.

So there's a lot of subtleties. But there are also less subtle things.

"We scorpios" or "we SSNs ending in 8" had better be joking. "We white people" not even then. "We Americans" is right out.

To twist the old joke, "Who is 'we', kemosabe?"

I think these issues are why I find objections to "cultural appropriation" so offensive. Most of the time the creative geniuses who produced the original works under dispute are dead and left no guidance on the subject, but my best model of them refuses to be "we"d on shared ancestry alone.

But maybe I'm typical-minding. I know Feynman refused to be an example of "We Jews have made major discoveries in physics", but I think Einstein embraced it. So, assorted friends, whom would you permit or forbid to refer to you as "we"?

There have been a few delays and tight moments, but overall I'm impressed with his the train network handled this year's Thanksgiving rush. See problem; solve problem.

There have been a few delays and tight moments, but overall I'm impressed with his the train network handled this year's Thanksgiving rush. See problem; solve problem.

Better one ugly CSS hack than a thousand petty cruelties.

</vaguebook>

A challenge for those of you who enjoy Bayesian reasoning:

I have a small random set of DNA snippets and a 23andme SNPlist. I am trying to determine if they come from the same person. I look just at the heterozygous SNPs in the 23andme data. For every one of them, the SNP in the DNA matches one of the two alleles in the 23andme. I do a series of Bayesian updates where p(that allele|same person)=0.5 and p(that allele|otherwise)=frequency in the population. I get a posterior<0.001. And yet, how could the data be a better match than every single SNP? It's not like I could get both sides. Have I not violated Conservation of Expected Evidence?

Bonus challenge: looking at the homozygous SNPs, about 80% matched. Why did I throw this out as useless and focus on the heterozygous ones?

Please rot13 your answers so as not to spoil it for others.

(Yes, this is real)

A Boeing 747 has a cruising altitude of 35000 ft, which means its horizon is about 230 miles away. The city of Macau is less than that distance from both Zhanjiang and Shantou, meaning that almost the entire province of Guangdong would be visible. That province has a population slightly over 100 million.

Being directly over Shenzhen would not give you line-of-sight on Zhanjiang, and the northern regions you'd pick up look less densely populated, so Macau it must be.

Good enough.

I realize that most of you have no idea why I care. Those who do may feel smug.

Before I forget to post, we successfully identified our DNA sample (it was from Craig Venter -- how the sample was acquired I don't know). We were the only team to do so.

Victory!

The vapidity of the NYT's anti-gun editorial pushed me so far to the pro-gun side that I deliberately sought out some stupid pro-gun arguments (which were not hard to find) to restore my balance. *This worked.*

I know all about the Inverted Stupidity Fallacy, but I still sometimes need to hack my own intuitive mind.

Something must have gone horribly wrong with political discourse. Especially since this seems to be general: the best way to feel strongly on *any* political issue is to read the mainstream opposing arguments and be disgusted at the thought of allying with those people.

How many people experience this? Would most advocates better serve their causes by shutting up?

From throne to lab to market stall
the word has spread among us all:
Our foe is dead, the Pox of Dread,
and ever so our foes shall fall!

With apologies to JRR Tolkien and Thorin Oakenshield

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day

Sat down in the library to work on my Machine Learning paper, in what happens to be the Russian history section. There are several dozen books with very generic titles like "A History of Russia". Then there's "Russia: A Concise History" which, while not thin, is about half the width of the others. Title accomplished.

On the next bookcase over is a 45 volume Collected Works of Lenin.

Final discussion in Genomics class: DNA computation. Specifically solving the Hamiltonian Path problem in linear time (with terrible constants and dubious scalability).

I had a very hard time not referring to the first node as "Bastard, Orphan, Son of a Whore".

I might have had an easier time had I gotten enough sleep recently.

Had I done so, I wonder how many of my classmates would have gotten it.

Good News: My code is linked to from a fairly major Bioinformatics popular science site (They boast 30k subscribers, not bad for such a niche field.)

Bad News: It's code I wrote hastily for a class and it could use a lot of cleanup.

I'm not sure if it's worth actually doing that. People may or may not follow the link.

Updated Dec 11, 2015 2:53:26pm

I keep seeing variant of the following argument, both here and in person:

1) Your position in society largely determines your lived experience
2) Your lived experience determines your view of society
3) The only way out of this trap is to believe with blind faith the people who have lucked into a position in society which lets them see everything clearly (you know who they are because they'll tell you)

The first claim is mostly true. The third is so absurd I'm not convinced anyone believes it in good faith. But the second is the really dangerous one.

Because experience is the beginning of knowledge, not the end.

With research, you can learn of things far from yourself.
With logic, you can discover things you can't discern directly.
With statistics, you can uncover what's really happening from beneath an ocean of noise.

These things can be hard. They can backfire if you do them very badly.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

(There may well be people out there who shouldn't, but I don't think any of them will be reading this. And even they should remember that other people have tried and succeeded.)

So, please, stop giving up. And stop *urging* people to give up. And if someone says they've succeeded, stop laughing. Be judiciously skeptical, but don't laugh.

Because it isn't hopeless. These three tools have surmounted countless challenges, and will again.

But if you argue for your limitations, sure enough, they're yours.

I try not to write about Solstice here because most of you already know all about it. But for those who don't, why it's important to me:

Because the world is full of things that genuinely inspire awe. We can and should experience that without the need to pay lip service to ideas we do not hold.

Because humanity has achieved great things in the past five thousand years. We can and should celebrate that unabashedly.

Because despite all we have achieved the world remains full of terrifying things and even more terrifying potentials. We can and should face those squarely, and face them together.

And because despite all terrors, there is hope. It is not the hope of ignorance. It is not the hope for some outside rescuer. It is the hope of knowing that we are not alone. We gather together in token of that, and so that we may remember.

This is not a silly holiday. It is not Festivus. It is not Santa Claus and Reindeer. We gather on the longest night of the year to stare together straight into the deepest darkness and *make* *it* *back* *down*.

To quote from a text that will likely be read:

> We live in a world where suffering and death are realities.
> And I will not try to tell you that that is somehow okay, because it’s not.
> And I will not try to tell you that we will necessarily ever overcome those things,
> Because I don’t know for certain whether we can,
> And tonight is *not* about blind hope.
>
> I can tell you will we will try.

-------------------------------------------
And for those of you who really don't know what this is about, some basics:

Mostly it's singing, and most of that together. There are speeches. There are a few other things. The great arc of light into darkness and back into light runs throughout it. The ceremony proper lasts about 3 hours, with informal gatherings both before and after.

All are welcome. If you literally expect God to intervene on the material plane, this will not be a good fit for you, but ordinary religious people should find no major conflicts.

You can learn more, and purchase tickets, at http://www.humanistculture.com/

Updated Dec 14, 2015 3:15:58am

The hard part of explaining Effective Altruism to people who aren't familiar with it is that everything that isn't EA sounds like such straw.

Today in Machine Learning we had four student groups present their projects. All four tried to pack in way too many details for a 15 minute presentation. This *despite* a warning from our professor on the subject.

I'll keep this in mind when I do mine next week. I wonder if others will.

It occurs to me that many colleges make it their mission to give their students practically useful tools, but few have a mandatory course in giving presentations. Perhaps they should.

Final project for Genomics is a 1200-1500 word proposal for a new application of cheap sequencing in teams of two. We each threw words into a Google doc last night and came to about 2100. Then we spent today carefully cutting: from unnecessary details to rewordings for brevity.

I'm pretty sure I remember trying to pad my writing back in undergrad. What happened?

Robert Wiblin proposed a new party game: Cards Against Humanity Being Destroyed.

Presumably the card czar draws an existential risk, and each other player has a hand of... something... from which they play a (set of?) card(s) that prevent the x-risk.

The whole thing needs to strike a careful balance between logic and absurdity.

Does anyone else kind of want to design and play this?

Remember all those metaphors about "rationality as a martial art"? I recently stumbled upon our great rival school.

Nothing serious here. I just found it amusing and thought some of you would too.

Updated Dec 17, 2015 2:08:18pm

Hundreds of billions of people someday.
Hundreds of billions of stories to tell.
Hundreds of billions of reasons to wonder:
Is anyone out there?
Is anyone out there?

Discussion of the new Star Wars, with some details but no spoilers
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I may have gone in with too high expectations. After all, we'd just sung:

Here and now, here and now:
we've got smallpox locked up tight.
Here and now, here and now:
brand new Star Wars out tonight.

The new Star Wars movie wasn't bad, but it didn't live up to its inclusion in that song. There wasn't much wrong with it, but there wasn't enough right either.

There wasn't enough *new*. Heroism out of common people, a small but expert resistance to a mighty evil power, space battles, light-saber duels, giant weapons -- all things we've seen before. What was new? Han and Leia growing old, looking into what it's like to be a stormtrooper, and the dark side as uncontrollable rage. These elements were good. The movie would have benefited from more time on them.

Relatedly, there was nothing really surprising. There was one moment that was probably meant as a shocking twist, and they set up the moment itself that I started to doubt it would happen, but it did exactly the way the broader plot foreshadowed.

Indirectly related, where was the New Republic? Why was Leia leading a "resistance" and not a "legitimate army and police force"? I think the real answer is that they were trying to recreate the feel of A New Hope too closely.

A lesser complaint: the force didn't really have two sides. There's just the force, and what makes it light or dark is the purpose to which it's applied. You can write good fantasy this way -- plenty have -- but that's never been how Star Wars works.

It wasn't a bad movie. There were some good things, and the rest was ok. It's just that we're not really looking for an ok Star Wars movie.

Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat.
Metaphysics is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there.
Theology is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there, and shouting "I found it!"
Science is like being in a dark room looking for a black cat using a flashlight.
Engineering is like carrying a black cat into the dark room.

From the made-sense-in-context department:

So you're trying to evade taxes with the help of a team of biologists but they're scared of Fourier transforms?

No, we're trying to *catch* tax evaders.

And done!

Final task was a presentation today. Take a super-dense 25 page math paper and condense it into a 15 minute presentation. It went well.

I'm going to Boston for Mystery Hunt (January 15-18) and I'm thinking about going up a few days early to see people in or near Boston that I don't get to see very often. I'm also thinking it might be good to see the Boston Rationality community in general just to keep the communities connected.

I can navigate the T but cannot drive, so getting to people may be limited.

I've never planned a trip like this before, so I may be bad at it.

But if you'd be interested in seeing me in or near Boston on January 12-14, let me know and I'll try to put it all together.

We have seen a new star come out of the east, and come to rest at the place: Cape Canaveral platform 13.

Congratulations SpaceX.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5bTbVbe4e4#t=32:25

Updated Dec 21, 2015 11:54:17pm

So passes solstice 2015. May the sun rise on us all tomorrow.

The problem with living at the bottom of a well near winter solstice is that I've completely lost what little circadian rhythm I had.

It seems my phone really is dying. The thing as a whole was getting old, but the clincher is that it's having trouble accepting charge. Does anybody have advice on replacement?

I definitely want to stay Android. I want to maintain USB mount capability unless the alternatives have improved a lot. I'm reluctant to spend more than $200, but open to discussion of why it might be worth it. I have fond memories of HTC from back when they did the N1, but I know it's been a while.

I tried taking the linked faceblindness test. I'm curious how well I did on the "here's one face, find it again" part, but not curious enough to sit through apparently multiple "here's six faces, find one of them" rounds. Are there seriously people who can do that?

(As a side note, all the faces here are Caucasian. I can see that diversity would make it too easy, and I doubt I'd do any better if they were all East-Asian or all Black, but there are probably people who would. I hope anyone doing serious research on this is paying attention to that.)

Updated Dec 27, 2015 5:47:04pm

What if...

When the Federal Reserve wanted to increase the money supply, it didn't loan to major banks but instead gave to Givewell top charities?

The money would still wind up in a bank account somewhere getting multiplied soon enough. Major banks would no longer be able to rent-seek on their Fed-worthiness. In general, we worry about incentives, but nobody's going to maximize their malaria risk for the hope of a free Fed-paid net.

I recently archive-binged unitOfCaring (Time management skills? What are those?) and one of the frequent themes is Competing Access Needs. I see thingOfThings is using the concept as well. It seems like a really useful one.

Does anyone have a sense of how widely known it is? Most of the world certainly *acts* as if they've never heard of it.

I might expand on that last sentence in another post. It's something I want to write about, but *carefully*.

It seems to me, that some people naturally expect the world to be on their side. Whether it's a formal authority or an angry mob, they support violence and oppose oversight because they believe deep in their hearts that it will never turn on them. Granted that, it's good to have such around to keep one's few enemies in check.

And there are some people who naturally expect the world to be against them. Who want more oversight, and less casual harm-doing. Because they believe that such things will turn on them, and that innocence is no protection.

I suspect both groups are right.

But I don't know where I'm getting that from.

I have bought a new phone. It's a Blu Life X8. It has 8 cores each running at 1.4GHz and 1GB of ram. Remember when specs like that would be a supercomputer? It also has a 5 inch 1280 x 720 pixel screen. I believe this qualifies it as an HDTV. Remember when those were big? :-)

Oddly, its 5 inch screen is slightly smaller than other 5 inch screens. I'm not sure exactly how that works, but it fits in my hand better so I'll take it.

I don't know if this was a good choice, but for $120 and can-have-it-now, I'll try it. In related news, B&H is The Place to go for things like this.

There's no USB mount capability. MTP is still terrible. But now I can run an SMB *server* on the phone and mount it *from* my desktop. Conceptually twisted, but nice in practice.

In related news, I have 17GB of music and only 4GB of available storage on the phone. For now I'll prioritize. In the future, I might buy a microSD card. How the heck did I accumulate that much music?

Annoyingly, this phone uses a slightly smaller style of SIM card, so I can't just transfer that. Tomorrow's project.

When I first encountered #blacklivesmatter, I thought that framing police violence as a race issue was a mistake for three reasons. First, general principles of honesty and simplicity. Second, because it divides people who ought to be united. Third, because it presents to police the demand "either stop killing innocent people or kill more white ones," and if the demand is heard, they will surely prefer the easier option.

And then I thought, that third point doesn't really count. Sure, incentive structures suffer from Lost Purposes frequently, but there are so many people involved that *somebody* will apply common sense or human decency at some point.

Then Oregon happened.

Lessons learned: trust the inside view more, and be more cynical.

My latest short story won the contest I wrote it for!

Granted, there were only 5 entries, but that's from a writing community of a few thousand.

And I already have an idea for this month's contest as well. A much sillier idea. We'll see if I get it written in time.

Updated Jan 06, 2016 8:28:54pm

In general, if I have lots of data and two variables I want to show are correlated, and I try controlling for n different sets of confounders, should I expect to be able to get p<1/n?

And you never quite know what will rise from the cauldron.
You never know what you'll unleash on the world.
You think and you plan; you compute and you ponder.
But you hope when the first of its flags is unfurled.

#contextFreePoetry

I'm not sure which is harder to shoehorn into triple meter: Shakespeare references or the phrase "coherent extrapolated volition".

Happy birthday!

The eye of a newt and the toe of a frog,
Some oil for scent and a shadow for sight,
The bone of the father and enemy's blood,
Emerge mighty golem and set things to right.

But you never quite know what will rise from the cauldron.
You never know what you'll unleash on the world.
You think and you plan; you compute and you ponder.
You hope when the first of its flags is unfurled.

Love for your neighbor, and structure for prayer,
Humility walking and comfort at night,
A few silly parts for outsiders to laugh at,
Emerge new religion and set things to right.

But you never quite know...

A mission most worthy, a leader and masses,
A manner in which to resolve any fight,
Duties and bylaws, traditions to guide us,
Emerge institution and set things to right.

But you never quite know...

All of the things that we wish that we wished for,
Keeping of goals throughout change beyond sight,
Stable decisions in Newcomb-like problems,
Emerge friendly AI and set things to right.

But you never quite know...

No you never quite know what will rise from the cauldron!
But worse is to sit and do nothing at all.
Our history calls us to solve bigger problems.
The more that we rise means the more we can fall!

And you never quite know.
No you never quite know.
Never quite know.
No.

------
Raymond: were you looking for something like this?

Paul Graham says that Ezra Klein says that Paul Graham says that startups are responsible for most economic inequality in the US. Paul Graham says that they are not, and furthermore that he did not say they were.

But without making any such clear empirical claim, Graham has tried to recenter our view of inequality on startups. In particular, he's written as if creating wealth is the typical way to get rich, and force/fraud/inheritance/zero-sum-skill/principal-agent-abuse are exceptions.

Maybe there's a bravery debate here. Maybe he's just trying as emphatically as he can to make the point that the creating wealth route *exists*, to an audience that overlooks it completely.

But the relative frequencies of the routes are important, and recenterings deserve better arguments than strawmen about the "pie fallacy".

Either Setec just won or we got drawn *inside* the dream.

•HUNTCEPTION

So where *does* one buy a sled?

In related news, I seem to have lost the cord for my camera. It was a nonstandard one. Fortunately, my laptop has a full-sized SIM card reader. I never noticed that until now.

The video didn't upload with the photos, but gives a better sense of the Hudson

Reading through annotations on Hamilton. Found this one amusing.

Original:
> And when my prayers to God were met with indifference
> I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance

Commentary:
> When you are the main character in a tragedy, giving the audience an eloquent and well-reasoned argument about exactly how and in what way you are more powerful than God is never a good sign.

He sort of gets away with it, but it's an interesting point, and one I hadn't thought of.

I think I've come to see the appeal of vi.

When you're running your editor inside a terminal multiplexer inside an ssh client inside a terminal window inside of a window manager *all* of which feel entitled to steal a few hotkeys here and there, it must be nice to have an editor that can be controlled with plain text characters and escape.

Maybe I should just use X forwarding. Latency from an EC2 instance in Oregon can't be that bad, can it?

General proposal: the parsimony of an explanation needs to be weighed against its degrees of freedom when constructing priors.

For example, given a crime the hypothesis that Mortimer Snodgrass did it is more parsimonious than the hypothesis that two people did it working together, but the latter has a higher probability (before evidence) because it has more degrees of freedom.

I tried to find a worthy tribute to Marvin Minsky. Then I tried to write one.

Instead, have a list of his quotes.

(farewell '(Marvin Minsky))
((will miss) we you)

Updated Jan 25, 2016 11:13:52pm

If someone took the same techniques Google just applied to the game of go, scaled them up a few more orders of magnitude with intent to set it loose on life in general, and before launch asked MIRI for safety advice -- would they be able to say anything beyond "don't"?

I'm seeing discussion of divergent utilitarianism in an infitine universe. Isn't that easy? As the time you're considering moves into the future, the maximum possible effect increases cubically but the information you have about what impact you'll have decreases exponentially. Past some point, the expected difference between any two actions can be approximated by zero. This gives you a finite light cone to worry about. Back to normal math. Am I missing something?

I recall reading once that among the ancient Celts, the warrior class was forbidden by law and custom from doing productive work. Not just exempt -- forbidden.

At the same time, the worker class was forbidden to hold weapons. Literally to hold them. If a sword had been left out on a table you were supposed to clean, you'd just have to come back and clean the table later.

Who could do useful work on weapons? Blacksmiths. They were their own, tiny, social class precisely to resolve this dilemma.

So if it's true that Red and Blue tribes correspond to classes, then Grey tribe's claim to be off to the side somewhere *has precedent*.

Fun feature: if you search pubmed for a topic, it will draw a little graph on the right of papers per year. There's a link to download the graph's data as csv.

Microbiome papers have been increasing 30% each year since 2005.

Is a claim arguable if you can write an argument it, but cannot pronounce that argument because it involves too much arugula?

From Superforecasting, h/t SSC;

> In 1988, when the Soviet Union was implementing major reforms that had people wondering about its future, I asked experts to estimate how likely it was that the Communist Party would lose its monopoly on power in the Soviet Union in the next five years. In 1991 the world watched in shock as the Soviet Union disintegrated. So in 1992-93 I returned to the experts, reminded them of the question in 1988, and asked them to recall their estimates. On average, the experts recalled a number 31 percentage points higher than the correct figure. So an expert who thought there was only a 10% chance might remember herself thinking there was a 40% or 50% chance. There was even a case in which an expert who pegged the probability at 20% recalled it as 70%.

These experts probably had a diverse set of techniques. That didn't matter.

Anyone who validates *any* form of prediction by waiting until the truth is known and asking predictors "did you see this coming?" is *doing it wrong*.

Key quotes:

This is the first black-hole merger that scientists have observed. The violent event temporarily radiated more energy — in the form of gravitational waves — than all the stars in the observable Universe emitted as light in the same amount of time.

The recording looked too good to be true. “When I first saw it I said, 'Oh, it's an injection, obviously,'” Allen says.

Crucially, both detectors saw it at roughly the same time — Livingston first and Hanford 7 milliseconds later. That delay is an indication of how the waves swept through the Earth.

Updated Feb 11, 2016 11:35:43am

Interesting recent experience:

One of my classmates took an audio recording of an ordinary spoken English sentence, found the phoneme breaks, replaced one phoneme with white noise, and played it for us. We all understood the sentence just fine, but none of us could tell which phoneme had been replaced. The subjective experience of *perceiving* a phoneme and *deducing* one from context are *indistinguishable*.

This is a known result that's been seen before. I don't know if anyone's tried it with musicians, speech therapists, or other people who think about sound a lot. Maybe they could do it.

My perception was that I had two parallel streams of experience: one in which I heard a sentence and one in which I heard a burst of static. They had no interconnections, so there was no way to synchronize a sense of time across them.

Same class, different classmate. Project involves perceiving emotion from auditory clues. To avoid other clues, the test sentences will be in German and the listeners will only know English. This may not be the best pair of languages to try this with.

And from *last* semester's class, it seems one of my homeworks (our homeworks, but a piece I did) may be getting patented. Details unclear. I'm not sure how to feel about this.

Mind-blow of the day:

One thing that can cause ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) is a mutation in a *short tandem repeat* on chromosome 9. In general, we're pretty confused about what STRs *do*. This one certainly does something.

The entire repeat is too long for a single pyrosequencing read, and extremely difficult to align. Current best practice is Southern Blot, which isn't very precise. So we're thinking about nanopore (we *may* have made a deal with the manufacturer where they give us free hardware and we figure out what it's good for). The existing base-calling isn't good enough, so we're looking at applying DSP and ML to the raw current data. When I learned basic DSP for neurology purposes I didn't picture this.

So the whole thing may or may not come to anything.

Still, STRs. Seriously.

Fun technique I just ran across: propensity analysis. Might be old news to some of you.

Suppose you have an observational study with a lot of potential confounders: things that effect both receiving treatment and outcome (in ways separate from treatment). Use all the confounders you can find to predict likelihood of receiving treatment, with whatever regression technique you like. Call this the "propensity". Regress the outcome to the propensity and take the residual. This is the effect on the outcome of the random noise that determined whether the patient received treatment. You now have a randomized controlled experiment -- produced purely through post-hoc analysis!

This method means that you don't shrink your data pool for every confounder, so you can include them more casually. If you include two confounders that correlate highly with each other, or one that actually doesn't relate to anything, it doesn't matter. The excess will be thrown out in constructing the propensity. At least so long as you stop short of actual overfitting.

You still get in trouble if you miss a variable, or include a variable which is an *effect* of both treatment and outcome.

Two questions about the San Bernardino case for anyone who really knows iPhones:

(1) Some people have talked about a unique id on the phone that we *do* know, such that Apple could write an OS that only ran on that phone and sign the completed kernel. This would grant access to the phone without granting access to all phones of the same model, or at least not without a bunch of work on the FBI's part. Does such an id exist?

(2) Given that this is a 5C, without a Secure Enclave, how difficult would it be to get a logic probe between the CPU and wherever the device key is stored? Or to read the key out of its storage despite the lack of an API? My general impression is that building hardware to withstand that sort of attack is really hard, but I can't find anything on this device specifically.

Recently used a pipe cleaner to clean a pipe. Worked well. Does that qualify as a life hack? It is a pretty strange thing to use a pipe cleaner for.

I'm posting this comic without explanation. I think it has relevance to various things that are best alluded to vaguely. Just this one page.

Updated Feb 28, 2016 2:34:57am

It is super tuesday. I guess one post about electoral politics isn't too much. Especially since I already left a lot of this as comments.

Why I support Bernie over Hillary:

## War

Hillary supported Iraq and organized the failure in Libya (I won't hold supporting intervention in Libya against her, that was reasonable, but she had a major role in designing it so I will hold the failure against her). I fully expect her to start at least one unnecessary war just to prove she's as violent as any man.

## Nuclear War

Hillary probably won't start a war with Russia, but I'd rather not bet my life on that. Her Syria plan is that Russia will switch sides. No further explanation. I hope she's just lying to the public. I worry that she sees "Putin supports Assad" as just another rule that doesn't apply to her, like "China will read any classified documents you leave on an unsecured server" or "the internet will fact-check you". If she goes into those negotiations as narcissistic and reality-divorced as she seems in general, it could be disastrous.

## Civil Liberties

Bernie voted against the patriot act twice. Hillary voted for it, and wants to expand untargetted digital surveillance further. Hillary was also pressing for Snowden to come home so he could be thrown in a secret prison and left to rot. This is an issue on which a president can do a lot. Bernie will probably veto the patriot act next time it comes up for renewal, and he might be able to rally 34 senators to keep it vetoed. He'll also have some authority to reign in the NSA without congressional involvement. Hillary will have no problem finding common ground with republicans on further eroding the fourth amendment

## Economics

Bernie's proposals may not be very good, which doesn't matter much because they won't pass. Hillary's proposals don't matter because nothing she says relates to the truth. Hillary has taken enormous bribes from wall street, and they expect something in return. And that will pass. Unchecked wall street is much more dangerous than excessive safety net. Just look at 2008.

## Electability

I'd say Bernie has the electability edge. Hillary's base is people who are going to vote democrat no matter what. Bernie is more likely to inspire apathetic liberals, less likely to inspire apathetic conservatives, and (less sure here) more likely to pick up swing voters because they're more likely to look at character rather than policy, and he's clearly ahead there. It gets more complicated if the republican is Trump, since he'll inspire the apathetic liberals and Hillary has a better chance to pick up anti-Trump republicans, but she's got a ton of scandals simmering, waiting for an attack, and he's really good at attacking. That could go either way.

People say she's "teflon" -- that's not an innate property; that's because the full energy of the Republican press hasn't focused on her yet, and the Democrat press treats her with kid gloves. This will change.

## Character

I think the biggest reason I'd vote Sanders is character. Hillary has shown there is no depth she won't sink to in order to claim the presidency, neither in policy nor in action. She doesn't hate the American people, but nor does she love us, and we are made of atoms she can use to gain more power. Previously I closed with a musical reference, but I think I'll go to the source material instead:

Bernie is at least a sincere lover of liberty and of the American people, and will be desirous of something like good government. Hillary loves nothing but herself.

Quick poll: if I have more thoughts involving the US election, should I share them here? Or are you getting sick of the political post volume? Like to vote:

Wow=Yes, share the thoughts
HaHa=Only if they're silly
Sad=Only of they're serious
Angry=No, don't post, there's too much already

This post contains serious US election thoughts and potential scrupulosity triggers. If you would rather avoid these things, have a kitten instead: http://i.imgur.com/GleAY3f.jpg
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So if it does come down to Trump vs Hillary, it seems reasonable to expect Hillary to be better at everything *except* avoiding war with Russia. And that's still a small risk -- call it 2% under Trump vs 4% under Hillary. Is that war such a big deal that a 2% difference in chance swamps everything else?

A war with Russia could go nuclear. A nuclear war could crash civilization irrecoverably (we don't have a respectable inside view, and outside is anthropicced to heck. As usual, Fermi is scary). Now we're in Astronomical Waste territory. The simplest model holds that good-future maximum eudaimonia is cubic whereas time/uncertainty discounting is exponential, but neither of those claims sounds really solid. Without that, the question becomes whether dark energy contains negentropy...

And this is about where my meta-level outside view system throws an alarm.

After all, this is a series of conjunctions. And I don't have numbers. And we know expected values get weird at extremes, and fall apart with divergent series.

But that doesn't answer the original question.

This is probably wrong of me, but I'm starting to feel grateful that I *don't* live in a swing state.

(On a side note, according to Google, I am the first person to ever use the phrase "eudaimonia is cubic". I find this strange. I can't be the first person to think about this.)

Updated Mar 03, 2016 8:20:08pm

Political post. Somewhat electoral. Probably upsetting from many angles. If you'd rather not read that, have a kitten instead: http://i.imgur.com/Vf0XWmE.jpg
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I see this pattern...

Yesterday: Yes, Social Justice Warfare is mostly classist and general-purpose bullying that does more harm than good, but we need to support anything that stands up to racism.

Today: Yes, Donald Trump is mostly a xenophobic and general-purpose bully that does more harm than good, but we need to support anyone who will stand up to the Social Justice Warriors.

Tomorrow: Yes, ISIS is mostly theocratic and general-purpose bullies, but we need to support anyone who will stand up to Trump.

Eventually: Yes, Lord Cthulhu will devour every last one of us, but we need to support anyone who will stand up to...

Bonus examples:

Yes, polio is a brutal killer, incapable of mercy, but we need to support anything that will stand up to Al Qaeda. (Yes, this happened)

Yes, the KKK is mostly racist and general-purpose bullying, but we need to support anything that stands up to these roving gangs of violent rapists. (Yes, that justification was taken seriously)

Iä!
Fhtagn!

Updated Mar 05, 2016 5:51:13pm

As a general heuristic, I propose that if two bayesian reasoners with similar priors arrive at different posteriors and are mutually aware of their disagreement, that they should both immediately update to at least 60% that they have somehow miscommunicated and are answering different questions.

(Not apropos of anything, except that I was reading something about Aumann's theorem.)

Given a confusing problem one wishes to make sense of, I know of three options:

You can break the problem into logical pieces, solve them one at a time, and then figure out how they go together. At the risk of misusing an existing term, I shall call this the "inside view". This is the most powerful option, but it is vulnerable to streetlight effects and unknown unknowns.

You can look for similar problems with known solutions and draw an analogy. Again, I'll call this the "outside view". This can get answers quickly, and is much more resistant to the preceding problems, but it is vulnerable to reference class tennis and fails altogether if there isn't enough precedent.

You can find who has already studied the problem and read what they've written. At the risk of severely misusing English, I'll call this the litre view. This can provide very complete analysis very quickly, but requires the true experts in the field to be identifiable (and any good).

Obviously there are mixed strategies. It's very pleasant when they all align.

The question that interests me is: is there a fourth view worth attempting?

As a general rule, if you have two data sets (correlated or not), their mutual information will go *up* when you condition on complete noise.

I guess it's not that weird. The new value is close to the MI for datasets half the size. Still feels weird, though.

Updated Mar 09, 2016 11:57:43pm

Cards Against Humanity Being Destroyed
----------------------------------------------------------

A game for 3-10ish players

*Harsh words on tumblr won't solve problems; actions will.*
--Ancient Air Nomad Proverb

The purpose of this game, besides silly fun, is to cultivate the mindset of looking for what you can do about a problem, instead of what humanity as a whole could do (if it were a single agent, which it's not).

The gameplay is simple. The card czar draws a problem card and reads it aloud, then declares how much effort is to be spent on the problem (from "one hour" to "dedicate your life"). Each player selects a resource card from their hand and decides how to use it, then places it face down in front of them. Once everyone is down, go around, show the cards and explain how you will use the resource to address the problem. In addition to the resource on the card, you may use any resource you possess in real life. It is not necessary to solve the problem, only to contribute to a solution or ameliorate it. The czar picks the best answer and awards that player the problem card. Everyone draws back up to seven resource cards. The czarship passes to the left.

Despite the name, problem cards aren't all x-risks. Some are megadeath-scale problems. Some are smaller problems with a personal connection. All are a little absurd, but would be worth taking seriously if they happened.

Resource cards can be objects, skills, or connections. They are things it is plausible for someone in our circles to have, but most of us don't.

I'm still working on writing the cards.

Why have resource cards at all? Mostly to give creativity some nucleation points. Also to provide a commitment/mark-ready mechanism. Maybe a little bit to get people in the habit of noticing what they have.

Updated Mar 13, 2016 3:10:22pm

Updated Mar 13, 2016 3:11:12pm

Achievement unlocked: truly wore out a pair of dance shoes

I'm surprised this is where it failed. I barely use my heals.

Happy Birthday!

Working with data I can't visualize is very frustrating. I can't tell if I'm getting weird answers because my code is buggy or because the universe is weird. I think it's the former. I hope so.

Relatedly, I am disturbed to realize that I have *never* seen a "Software Engineering" section in a bioinformatics paper. Yes, clever algorithms and interesting results are nice, but they don't mean anything if you wrote "if (hom)" where you meant "if (hom[i])". (I've seen that).

Testing? Code reviews? Organization? Readable code? Did you use any of these things?

I'm guessing some do, and most don't. But since nobody talks about it, it's really hard to know which results to take seriously.

Today I defeated a home intruder in single combat. Not an armed intruder, true, but with four legs and a tail.

Yes, it was a mouse.

The post-combat crash is still in effect.

I flushed it out from under my clothes chest by swinging a split bamboo bokken back and forth under there blindly. (Why do I possess such an item? It must have seemed like a good idea at some point.) I may have hit the creature in the process. It was moving more slowly than I'm used to once it was in the open, but had no obvious injuries.

Once I could see it, I stuck a cardboard box next to it and scared/shoved it in with the bamboo. Then I righted the box, closed it, and stuck a textbook on top of it to keep it closed. I went and got my winter coat (it's snowing -- first day of spring, after two weeks of beautiful spring weather, and it's snowing) then brought the box down to Riverside park and released the mouse there. It was reluctant to leave the box, but had nothing to hold on to, and moved for other cover reasonably quickly once clear.

I'm split between feeling disturbed at having possibly injured a living chordate out of mere territoriality and feeling proud of having finally made something truly regret messing with me.

Now if only I could do the same to the virus that has intruded into me.

I don't agree with all of this, but it's an interesting look at the complexity of nouning adjectives of people.

Updated Mar 21, 2016 7:31:25pm

I offer two general principles that are, I think, largely uncontroversial:

* The first step to solving a problem is to understand it

* You cannot both understand a person and hate them

From these I derive something less widely accepted:

* If you wish to solve a problem involving people, you must begin by not hating them

This may be why problems involving people are hardly ever solved.

I've been reading the Bad Conlang Ideas tumblr. Naturally, I've been having ideas...

A language in which all semantic information is in consonants, but vowels provide emotional context. "uh" indicates contempt. "ee" indicates excitement. The language is usually written consonants-only.

In many languages, there's a superstition about referring directly to bad things summoning them, and circumlocutions replace words. This happens a lot with "bear". A language in which this has gone way too far, combined with incredible memory, such that they're starting to run out of safe syllables, and some of their early favorite phonemes have been abandoned entirely.

I'm aware I live in something of a media bubble. In the interests of breaking out: is anyone making a credible argument that Hillary *didn't* rig the Arizona election? I looked for one, but that's hard to search for.

After much confusion, I now know that the strongest results from my earliest investigations came from bugs in my code, not attributes of reality. My dataset may be underpowered to find anything interesting.

Send hugs.

Is there a noncumulative version of the chi squared test? Something that gives the probability of this exact count given an expected count? It wouldn't be useful for p-value testing, but you could divide two of them and call it an odds ratio. That might rescue some of my results.

Yes, I could investigate this myself, but not quickly, and it seemed like the sort of thing somebody here might know off the top of their head.

Did anyone *not* get that "Are you all right?" notification about the explosion in Pakistan?

I'm starting to think about Rationalist Seder, and I'm taking requests (well, considering requests -- no promises).

For those not familiar, the themes of the evening are freedom and storytelling. Freedom begins by escaping from taskmasters with whips, but it is not complete until we can truly follow our own wills. Freedom can be limited by ignorance, bias, despair or miscoordination.

Storytelling is how we keep ideas alive in our minds. Knowing a fact is rarely enough. One must be able to apply it. And one must think of it at the time it is relevant, often the time that it is hardest to think of. Stories enable these things.

What stories do you think should be told this year? Or on what themes should stories be told?

Why do I spend an entire day groggy and then finally wake up for real at 1am?

If you need to hit one rhyme three times in two lines, make it a three syllable rhyme -- that way you won't be distracted by having too many options.

#contextFreePoetryAdvice

Happy Birthday!

It seems that I kind of, sort of, not really -- with no effort on my part -- co-authored a scientific paper. I did write a few things that would have been relevant to it, but they weren't included.

http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2015/12/24/035303.full.pdf

Updated Apr 02, 2016 6:37:44pm

It's not exactly what I wanted, but it's something.

Lactobacillus acidophilus being harmful is really weird.