An Incomplete Education

A great teacher once told me, “Great teachers will unhesitatingly sacrifice the truth to teach...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:39:03 -0400

A great teacher once told me, “Great teachers will unhesitatingly sacrifice the truth to teach the Truth.”

The shrinking cage

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 23:04:00 -0400

I’ve been trying to find something meaningful to write—a ‘why’—in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing, and of course there are none that are meaningful to me.

The similarity of Fundamentalism across distant times and places and cultures is striking; there must be a similar structure of thought undergirding all of these strains.

The older bomber, Tamerlan, entered music school but abruptly left. Why? Music wasn’t compatible with Islam.

Tamerlan loved music and, a few years ago, he sent Khozhugov a song he’d composed in English and Russian. He said he was about to start music school.

Six weeks later, the two men spoke on the phone. Khozhugov asked how school was going.

“I quit,” Tamerlan said.

“Why did you quit?” Khozhugov asked. “You just started.”

“Music is not really supported in Islam,” he replied.

“Who told you that?”

I have visited souks, khans, and the markets of the Middle East. It is trivially easy to find a music dealer in any of them. I assure you that there is a long tradition of music in Morocco, pop stars rocking Cairo, and jazz in Beirut. Turkish guitar is complex and layered. Arab beats are banging.

And yet, without even knowing what sort of a Fundamentalist a person is, you can probably guess that they believe that music, singing, dancing, acting, drinking, nudity, sex, and sensuality are all forbidden¹.

That there can exist a diet that is not simply unhealthy, or forbidden, but genuinely evil. Why is this so common? How can it be that love is verboten?

I’ve a hypothesis.

These things all stir parts of us that are not entirely rational, and therefore not governable by reason alone: the heart, the body, a soul. There is no ‘reason’ to dance. You can map the logic of music, but the actual act of making music has nothing of logic in it. It is common for jazz musicians to disappear into their set. Actors pantomime and absorb the feelings and thoughts of something that is outside themselves: their character, their audience.

We do it for the feeling. For the expression. These things all give names to the nameless. And a nameless thing is beyond the control of the rational mind.

The last moment you have power over these things is the judgement to accept them (or not). So the most possible power your conscious mind can have over this is to say ‘no’. Otherwise, you abandon your critical, reasoning, and judging mind to some extent.

This all hinges on judgement, a perennial favorite among Fundamentalists of all stripes. Judgement seems to give power, but it also entraps. Can you imagine a life without music? With diversion? Without flying kites? All for a feeling of control?

The Fundamentalist sees much in the world that is not divine.

The more you try to hold this focus of mind, the more it escapes you, like squeezed water through you fingers. A woman stirs your loins, so you yell at her to stop being a slut. A book causes you to question, and so it burns in the fire. You catch your toes tapping, so the music is silenced.

Fundamentalism fails to accept that we are more than mind. It posits a stark world of good and bad that steadily shrinks as more and more things get tossed onto the ‘bad’ pile.

It must seem as though the world becomes more manageable as it shrinks, and it does. Prisons are straightforward like that.

Late edition: Jain Clergy supporting terrorism.

Violence and stimulants (caffeine, tobacco, khat) being the common exceptions. ↩

"The audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will...."

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:49:28 -0400

“

The audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned in to watch drama.

DAVID MAMET

”

TPM is hiring an entry level news writer: You need to be a news omnivore or rather a news...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:58:05 -0400

TPM is hiring an entry level news writer:

You need to be a news omnivore or rather a news carnivore because doing the job right requires a keen eye for a TPM story and the ability to pounce quickly — so a news Velociraptor not a Stegosaurus.

Let me tell you why this is great writing. In one sentence, you get the idea of how the job will feel and a sense of the narrative you’ll develop there.

A lot of people (especially college grads) don’t know if they are cautious, or adventurous, or capable of making quick, good decisions. But this gives you a sense of the feel.

I’d bet this’ll get much better matches than the standard, “Entry level position at a fast-paced environment” stuff you see.

theyre after me lucky charms, jamtastik: quierosonreir: rayquayza: ...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:52:42 -0400

theyre after me lucky charms, jamtastik: quierosonreir: rayquayza: ...

Moore's law applied to life

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:43:44 -0400

Moore’s law is an old engineering prediction: that a CPU’s information processing ability will double every two years.

What would happen if we looked at life as an information processing … process? And then looked backwards? This:

It’s from an (arxiv)[http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/] paper. What researchers found was that if you assume life to be an information processing entity, than it has origins of about 10 billion years ago, 5 billion years before the Sun formed, and 6 billion before our very own Earth.

It’s an interesting hypothesis, and I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong. The 10 billion year estimate puts the origin of life at around when there when the interesting elements were first being spread by the death of the first generation of stars.¹

But, I think they forget their starting point:

They say there is good evidence that bacterial spores can be rejuvenated after many millions of years, perhaps stored in ice.

Once you start to look at life as an information processing entity, you can go back a lot further than bacteria, or even DNA. The simplest biological information processing units are proteins.

Each protein is set to recognize a single molecule (or family of related molecules), merge with it, transform it, release it, and then get ready for the next encounter. Flawlessly and neigh endlessly, each protein recognizes information (that’s a yes|no!) and then transforms it. Boom — computation. The simplest proteins are made of CHON (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen) and have no trouble existing in interstellar space or comets. If the authors are going to redefine what life is, then they need to broaden their horizons a bit more.

I can buy that proteins go back 10 billion years ago. A cloud or soup of CHON will produce them through Brownian motion, and they’ll start computing the moment they hit something they ‘recognize’. The longer they go on computing, the more evolved and stable the whole system will become.

I feel like this is good work. It provides a really good answer to Fermi’s Paradox.

The first stars were made of hydrogen, helium, and lithium. As they burned, these atoms fused into heavier and heavier elements. Those elements were released into the cosmos when those stars went nova. ↩

The central matter

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 19:21:00 -0400

As we age, our brains betray us. They take longer to work, they forget things, and they betray us in numerous ways. I can now no longer recall what I have forgotten from school. I have forgotten that I have forgotten.

Physics places some strict limits on the brain; it cannot grow past the skull, it must stay within a narrow temperature range, it craves about 1/5 of the body’s energy budget. It is as physically fragile as grandma’s green Jell-O surprise.

I’ve been lucky enough to touch (an unused) one; the gray matter comes up on your fingers. I washed dreams down the drain with soap.

I’ve come to think that the problem with aging has little to do with degradation of the machinery. The electrons still flow as quickly as ever, and the information of memory and processing is stored in the structure of synapses, not the cells themselves. And it’s the structure that I would like to point to.

That’s the part that degrades, or, rather, fills up. One of the things a brain does is the it creates a traversable order from a chaos of neural connections and weights. As an infant, we have a plastic brain, a blank slate, on that will accept virtually any circumstance or information. That information can be recalled, processed (and does the processing!), and used to project into the future. As we age, learning, thinking, and recall become more difficult; there are less and less potential configurations that our brain can be in. As we accrete experience, our brain loses potential.

As we age, we forget. We forget things that aren’t important to us anymore; this frees up connections and weights for more useful information. But it also changes the way that the brain processes information, since the part of the brain that does the remembering and processing are the same.

The reason our cognitive abilities degrade (I hypothesize) is not so much because our brains become cobwebbed; it’s because they become so full of complicated connections that are not forgotten. That space is much more difficult to traverse than than a new life with fewer experiences. Aging is an inevitable walk into entropy, for the body, for the brain.

There’s a good SciFi hook for you there too. What happens if medicine can make us immortal, but the only way to rejuvenate our brain function were to reset it? It would be functional reincarnation.

I remember when the Science Fiction section was full of books...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 17:35:22 -0400

I remember when the Science Fiction section was full of books with rocket ships and aliens and dragons. Now it’s all boring earth humans.

Management

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 11:46:00 -0400

Scott Adams theorizes that “Management exists to minimize the problems created by its own hiring mistakes.”

I’d generalize it to: management exists to create conditions under which management will continue to exist.

Think of it this way; if management solved all the structural and personnel problems at a business their raison d’êtra would cease. But, being people with mortgages and kids to send to college, management makes decisions that justify, support, and retrench their places in an organization.

For instance, many (most?) sales teams are composed of: Accounts, salespeople, and a sales manager. Having been a part of one (a big one with multimillion dollar accounts) and an observer of many more, I’ve noticed that there is a ton of the work in a sales team is simply squabbling. What do you do when two accounts merge? Squabble. What do you do when a contact moves to someone else’s account? Fight. What do you do when another sales person nabs an account you have been prospecting for weeks? Kill.

Which is why you need a sales manager. Someone has to sort this out.

But what happens when you have a conflict between the East Coast Team, and the Chicagoland team? Then I you’ll need a VP of Sales.¹

See how this sort of structure keeps rationalizing and reinforcing itself?

There are a few difference in how organizations make money that make this happen. There are roughly two ways of organizing human beings: networks and hierarchies. Hierarchies make money by extracting value from limited resources. Networks create value by distributing free, or very cheap, resources.

The easiest way to make money with a hierarchy is to have a monopoly on a resource.

The easiest way to make money selling free stuff? Well, you can’t monopolize something that everyone has, so that’s out. But you can own the network. Think AT&T. Think Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Google? Well, they don’t own the network of the Internet, but the own the access to it and it’s shape, which is the next best thing.

Managers don’t have a lot to do in a network. All the individual nodes do the distribution and quality control. And since anyone can join a network (indeed, the network’s value increases based on the total value of it’s nodes, not the value of the resources it controls).

Valve owns a network, not a hierarchy. They make hit games, sure, but they put one out every decade or so. Their real money maker is Steam, an online game distribution, matchmaking, authentication, and backup service. There are others, but Valve owns the only network that matters. Just like Facebook, or Twitter.

Anyhow, Valve does hire good people. Check out the Valve Employee Handbook. It’s pretty awesome.

I have always advocated a sales team that does it’s own hiring, training, firing, and goal setting. Removing those aspects removes buy-in, and thus a true sense of accountability. “But what about bonuses? This is all sounding very Communist.” Well, more like Socialist, but sure. I’d move to quarterly team bonuses. This cuts the fighting over accounts, and reinforces that the job just needs to be done. It also makes it clear who is and isn’t pulling their weight. The team can address why; should there be more training? A shifting of responsibilities? Or does someone need to get sacked? ↩

Home

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 21:00:17 -0400

gneissgirl:

circuitdesign:

anincompleteeducation:

I sometimes forget that the Sun, too, is moving through space. And that we spin around it like the stitches on a football.

It’s all relative, isn’t it?

What’s the angle between our plane of revolution and the sun’s motion vector? Anybody?

According to the Bad Astronomer, 60 Degrees. So, I suppose I should have said, “like stitches on a badly thrown football.”

What Is The Internet Worth? « The Dish

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:56:08 -0400

What Is The Internet Worth? « The Dish:

One of the interesting things about an economy is that the value everything is defined by the value of everything else. There is no “outside” thing that can be effectively referenced.

More interestingly, the more we compare the value of things in an economy (by buying and selling), the faster the economy moves.

The more things we are able to bring into the economy (resources, new forms of accounting for value that was already there), the faster it grows.

Potatoes

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:40:00 -0500

“How many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman?” “How many?” “None!”

I heard this joke a few years ago; it was told by an Irishman, to an Irish audience at a party. They were all recent immigrants, with accents still and family back on the Emerald Isle, and plans to maybe go back, but for now, they were New Yorkers.

And each, in turn, told their own potato jokes.

They didn’t see it, but their joking offended a fellow I knew to be very Irish-American. For him, the potato famine was symbol, a chunk of cultural heritage. Narrative.

After yelling at the jokesters for their disrespect, the Irish-American left the party in a huff.

Even though he had never experience the potato famine of the 1840s, had no family members who were affected by it, and indeed had no family members who had family members who had family members who were affected by the famine, the symbol had weight.

There was no experiential, no tangible connection. The only connection was a narrative one.

I myself got into trouble for correcting him about the first Irish-American president. Jack Kennedy?

“No, Andrew Jackson.” “That’s not an Irish name!” “His parents were off-the-boat Irish!” “He’s German! [Ed: it wasn’t and he knew it] There weren’t any Irish people in America before the famine.”

I didn’t press the facts, because they didn’t actually matter. Nor did I mention that my Irish ancestors were plowing fields here by the mid-1700s.

At some point in his upbringing, he was handed the talismans of his identity:

“Anyone whose last name starts with an ‘O’ is your fiend.” “This shamrock is our symbol.” “Green is the color of our homeland.” “You should hate the British for what they have done to us.” “We all came over in the Famine.” “Then we were treated badly.” “That man was our first president.”

I’ve noticed that the more someone is steeped in this sort of symbolic culture, the harder they will work to keep from breaking from it. I know plenty of successful Irish- and Italian-American lawyers that wax on about the motherland, but will never think to buy tickets and go see it.

They’d rather keep the symbols, and the narrative, than have them replaced by an unknown reality. The narrative thread that binds all of these symbols together can be far more important than a once in a lifetime chance to connect with lost relatives from the old country, or listen a Pink Floyd cover band while sipping red wine next to the Parthenon.

This is deep in the wiring; I see it in some of humanities oldest conflicts. We have to honor it, before we can overcome it.

Narrative vs. Science

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 21:29:00 -0500

The Atlantic has an article about biblical pseudo-archaeogists digging with bulldozers in the west bank. There are a lot of dimensions to this, but I want to focus on narrative dimension, ‘cause that’s my schtick.

Price believes that DNA from charred goat bones he discovered at Qumran will prove a genetic match for the leather skins of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He theorizes that the bone deposits are in fact evidence of an ancient ritualized feast that anticipated the coming messiah. Many of his supporters take the claim further, saying Price has hit on evidence of the Last Supper—an interpretation he is careful to distance himself from, though he won’t deny the possibility. “You can see where this is heading,” Greenberg said. “There is no way he can set up a scientific structure of proof. If you find bones you can say anything about that.”

The caves at Qumran are separated from Jerusalem, the scene of the last supper, by 30 kilometers of desert. How could Christ have made the trip?Jerusalem is where you go if you want to make a statement to the Jewish and Roman world. Qumran is where you go to get away from that. Why would Christ be there? Charred goat bones are evidence that goat bone were cooked—an event that must have happened frequently over the last two millennia. How could he be certain these were the very bones?

But these aren’t the facts that we want to string together, are they? If the Dead Sea Scrolls are bound in goat skin, so of course the next bones you find will be from that very skinned goat.

You just need a connection, and it need only look good on first impression.

As he spoke, Greenberg set down his empty mug. “Somebody could find this coffee cup and say the Prime Minister of Israel was here.” He listed off proofs: “He drinks coffee. We’re in Israel. Maybe he is known to come to this cafe.”

Exactly. The item is what binds the important parts of the narrative together. The more it binds, the better the item. It’s importance is only related to the things it brings together.

“Science doesn’t work by building up a house of cards and trying to prove it,” Greenberg said. “Science works by ruling out all possibilities until only one is left.”

Put another way, narrative works by having only one possibility, and finding a reason to discard all others. Where science sees only pearls, narrative sees only the necklace.

It’s in the wiring, so, as much as scientists would like to ignore it, we have to honor it.

An ode to chess pieces

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 18:51:00 -0500

(Written as though someone were trying to sell chess today)

The Queen: There is nothing on an open board that can match her; her beauty, her grace, her elegant expression of symmetric power are matchless. But her crown is made of glass. She is easily used, easily abused, and easily lost.

The Bishops: The spear—-one of your bishops will slide and skewer, and project power through impenetrable lines of pawns. The other will often as not fall on his sword, or deliver a surprise check at the right moment. Or maybe pin a critical piece in place?

The Pawns: Individually limited, the pawns set the terrain of the battlefield. Their lines can form jagged rocks to trap you enemies, interlocking files of struggle, impenetrable fortresses, or inescapable prisons. Individually limited, each contains the seed of greatness.

The Rook: Start late, arrive early. The rook will develop slowly, but soon masters the board. Two rooks are a fearsome challenge. Two rooks and a Queen? A death sentence.

The Knight: A leaper, a jumper, a cat that walks through walls. This piece was born to force hard choices on your opponent, early, and often. Late in the game, he infuriates enemies, continually slipping between their fingers.

The King: The keystone of the army, the king has seen many battles, and is prepared for nearly any contingency. He excels at support. He excels at command. He is too arthritic to face the full fury of combat, but the old man is stronger (and wilier) than he appears.

Full metal mumu

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 13:32:15 -0500

me: Lawyers are some of the worst advertisers around. Which makes sense, because they are *taught to obscure, rather than reveal the truth*: Jackson Lewis " All we do is work."; McElroy Deutsch: "Expansive"
K: eh, obscuring truth is a fairly large part of advertising. Truth in advertising would get depressing in a hurry. BMW: "It's a car, but we added a lot of zeros to the price tag because fuck you"
me: Yeah, bad advertising. Good advertising is like a a beautiful woman in a nice dress. Just a **llleeeettle** bit of clevage. Just a hint.
K: yup
me: Law firms tend to go full-metal mumu
K: hahaha. There's something under there... but you're not gonna like it.

Home

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 08:31:52 -0500

I sometimes forget that the Sun, too, is moving through space. And that we spin around it like the stitches on a football.

#Epic(universe)fail

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:46:00 -0500

I shy from science writing because I’m no expert. But it’s too thrilling not to give it a go! A little background.

Know how a fish lives in water? Breathing it, drinking it, swimming in it, smelling it, tasting it? Well, we live in fields: electromagnetic, the strong force, gravity, and so on. We don’t much notice them, unless there is a disturbance, or we push on them and they push back. Go ahead, jump out of your seat; give the planet a push. You’ll notice that gravity snaps you right back in place.

If you give a field a knock, hit it hard enough, it’ll break off a piece. Hit the electro magnetic field hard enough, and you get a photon. Hit a strong field, and you’ll get a gluon, the thing that holds our atoms together. Well, mostly. These things, the things you get when you hit a field hard enough, are all called bosons. They’re the product of force being applied to something. (The other big family of particles is the fermions—-they exist on their own, without something having to be hit. Electrons, protons, and all your high school particles.)

The recently confirmed Higgs boson is what you get when you hit the field that gives us mass.

But get a load of this:

You’ve got E for energy on the Y-axis, and 𝛗 (Greek lowercase ‘phi’) for the “value of the scalar field”. (You see a scalar field when you look at a weather map on the evening news. A rain scalar.) You’ve also got a ball on the curved line, which is the Higgs boson as we see it today, and, well, all of reality.

So, at the beginning of things, the universe was filled with energy; the ball was at the top right. The universe cooled, and the ball rolled down the slope. It didn’t weigh too much, so it stopped at the little valley called “false”.

“False” isn’t how we think of the total sum of all being, is it?

The LHC has put good limits on the weight of the Higgs. We already knew that it wasn’t so heavy as to roll down to “true Vacuum”. But that’s Newton-think, and we know he wasn’t all there was to know about physics.

Newtonian stuff is geometric, arithmetic, and full of mechanical symmetry. Everything adds up and everything is predestined. Boooring. Quantum physics is statistical; the electrons in your hand are statistically everywhere in the universe, but are likely to be in your hand when you look.

In the quantum universe, things don’t roll. They’re here, and now they are there. They teleport. Statistically speaking, it was likely there, and now it is likely here.

What would happen if a the Higgs boson teleported over that hill that separates the false vacuum from the true vacuum?

Well, this new Higgs bit of reality would be more stable, and you have to remember, reality is lazy. It loves to be stable. This stable stuff, would drag near-by bits of reality to a lower level, releasing great gobs of energy. This bubble would quicken to the speed of light, affecting everything with mass. Which is everything you care about.

How complete would the destruction be? The only thing left from our universe would be math. That’s pretty much a total loss. And photons. Maybe. Maybe.

The fun term for this is “vacuum failure”.

"A mongrel form of communication"

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 12:48:00 -0500

A mentor once said that to me. He was talking about this sort of thing:

That is, a huge wall of text standing behind a speaker. It violates a ton of communication principles. Here are a few.

The literate mind automatically begins to process words as soon as it sees them. Why would a speaker want to split the audience’s attention? Too often, these sort of distractions just hang in the background, allowing audience members to fake interest by staring behind the speaker. Ever wonder why all speakers that do this are unable to move a crowd? This is because the critical feedback loop of adjusting a speech to the audience in real time is broken.

The text is disrespectfully dense. When we are faced with dense text in our normal lived—a book, a memo, a computer screen—we automatically adjust the text to a comfortable distance. When it is projected on a screen, we are stuck with squinting. This is why all movies project text in giant, single lines, or are Star Wars, and give you the text in all possible sizes. Why would you want your audience to struggle with your message?

Documents composed as a deck are necessarily half thoughts and incomplete sentences. Those are the only things that fit. Therefore, plans and actions that come from decks are incomplete. The better model is a strongly visual presentation, accompanied by a memo with an executive summary and details following that.

Betrays the medium. A speech with a projection is a profoundly visual medium. Every slide that fails to honor that fact weakens the whole message.

Physically difficult to hold. Printed decks are in landscape, and never seem to fit into our muscle memory, which is tuned to paper in portrait. If landscape was so great, why wasn’t it adopted by book and newspapers ages ago?

I could go on. Maybe in a separate post?

MAKE EVERY CHILD. This graphic, despite it’s blockiness,...

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 22:45:00 -0500

MAKE EVERY CHILD.

This graphic, despite it’s blockiness, breathes. Yellow-on-Blue? An advertising classic. An added touch is that they avoided “Democrat Blue”.

But it breathes. They focused on the important parts—-MAKE and EVERY CHILD, and toned down the Latinate and hyphenated words.

Yeah. That graphic sucks. The three tone ring is nice, but the...

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 22:36:32 -0500

Yeah. That graphic sucks. The three tone ring is nice, but the text comes in big painful blocks. Tough to swallow.

Cyber? What is this, the 90s?