01.31.09
Genius
Genius is merely the combination of original ideas and a level of skill sufficient to realize them.
01.28.09
Programming by Intent via Automatic Search and Function Binding
There’s a problem with Matlab. Even though it’s great for high-level programming, it just has too many functions, of which even the most seasoned developer is doomed to know only a small fraction. For example, the function pdist will return a matrix of pairwise distances, yet I’ve seen the same being done manually countless times.
Rather than cutting down the functionality provided by the language or forcing the user to “specialize” in studying certain Matlab functionality, I thought of an alternative approach:
The user knows what he wants to do. He wants to “compute the pairwise distance between observations in matrix A”. At this moment, his best bet is issuing the command “lookfor pairwise” and sifting through the results.
But wouldn’t it be nice if he could type “I want to compute the pairwise distance between observations in matrix A”, and, based on the documentation and some tagging of the functions, Matlab would automatically fill in “pdist(A)”?
This can apply to any language, of course. Java seems another good candidate, given the number of standard classes in J2SE.
01.21.09
It isn't worth it.
I stumbled upon this article:
http://exp-platform.com/semmelweisReflex.aspx
And found an interesting extract from it:
“According to Childbed Fever: A Scientific Biography of Ignaz Semmelweis (p. 69) an 1856 publication in a prominent Viennese medical periodical, Viennese Medical Weekly, by Jozsef Fleischer, a student of Semmelweis, showed success of chlorine washings. However, the editor for the periodical wrote at the end of the report “We believe that this chlorine-washing theory has long outlived its usefulness. The experiences and statistical results of most maternity institutions protest against the views presented above. It is time we are no longer to be deceived by this theory.”
Vienna continued to ignore his recommendations. In 1861, he published a book, but the community rejected his doctrine. In 1865 he suffered a nervous breakdown and was taken to a mental hospital, where he was beaten by asylum personnel and died. It took another 14 years for the discovery to be accepted, after Louis Pasteur, in 1879, showed the presence of Streptococcus in the blood of women with child fever. Semmelweis is now recognized as a pioneer of antiseptic policy.”
First of all, I’ve never heard of Semmelweis before this, but I certainly have heard of Pasteur. Second, Semmelweis’ work had literally no impact in the scientific community because it was ignored until Pasteur replicated the findings (upon which everyone suddenly started paying attention, and probably attributed the discovery to him for quite some time).
Finally, and most compelling, taken from Semmelweis’ perspective, this was an utter loss. He found a way to save lives and greatly advanced medical practice (even if he wasn’t quite aware why), and for it, he was variously ignored, denounced, and vilified to the point of his own death. So what if he is now remembered? What good does posthumous recognition do him?
01.16.09
Baroque, Rococo, and Reformation
All of human history is a battle between simplicity and complexity. It is reflected in our culture, our science, our philosophy, our governments, our conflicts, and our actions.
We constantly build large, intricate, complex systems, only to later knock them down and return to basics.
01.13.09
Beauty as an exclusive ideal
I thought I’ve mentioned this here, but perhaps not. My observations on beauty ideals can be summed up as follows:
“Beauty is what most people are not, but the elite are always beautiful.”
I call it the “white face” hypothesis. Beauty ideals (across many different cultures!) traditionally favored pale features prior to modernity, as they were indicators of high social status (everyone else was out working in the fields all day). When the connotation of social status disappeared, tan suddenly became in. I suppose one reason for this may be the indication of enough money to spend it frivolously, but more likely it’s just a trait idealized by celebrities and televised role models.
01.12.09
Does the disk matter as much as the filesystem?
It seems, at least in the case of NTFS and ISO9660, that the filesystem is actually more of a bottleneck than the disk itself. Lots of small files can cut the transfer speed down by 2-3 orders of magnitude, even down to about 100 KB/sec. Linux filesystems seem to do much better on small files, but it makes me wonder what particular access strategy is causing the bottleneck.
The data should even be sequential on disk, making this all the more puzzling.
01.11.09
The Decreasing Requirements for an "Advanced User"
Perhaps technology is just maturing, but the questions installers and other computer programs ask for “advanced users” have decreased significantly in difficulty. Whereas 10 years ago, an “advanced user” may have been expected to manually specify IRQs of legacy devices such as soundcards in something as simple as a game, there are a number of installers today whose “advanced” options simply allow the user to specify the installation directory.
Much of the complexity is being hidden within the operating system as well; with every new version, Windows hides more and more of what is going on under the hood. This is fine as a setting; it is extremely annoying (to people who understand what is going on) as a standard way of doing things. Windows 7 Explorer no longer even shows you which folders it is copying files from when performing a recursive copy or move.
I can’t help but think that the end result of this is something out of “Idiocracy”, where the only requirement for being a “computer technician” is knowing what a directory is and everyone stares in amazement at simple file system navigation.
01.10.09
Different Ring Behaviors at Different Times of Day
My father complains of a friend who routinely calls at 7 AM, often waking him up. This led me to wonder why phones don’t have an option for different ring behaviors at different times. For instance, between 12 and 7, one may wish to have the phone vibrate rather than create an audible ring, or to create an audible ring with lower volume (to avoid waking others up).
01.09.09
An interesting brain/learning tidbit…
When performing working memory processing tasks, the anterior cingulate cortex lights up. It does not during memory recall (the medial temporal lobes do, which sort of makes sense as the medial temporal lobe is the location of the hippocampus). The ACC also responds to pain, fear, and other unpleasant “avoidance” sensations.
Maybe there’s a physiological basis for the avoidance people display to challenging mental tasks? Can it be that the body interprets it as another form of pain?
Edit: Ooh, it increases with task difficulty too.
01.07.09
Fuller on change means geopolitical power cannot remain concentrated in one place.
“To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
–R. Buckminster Fuller
When this is applied to governments, it becomes painfully obvious why the center of political power is destined to continually shift. Disruptive paradigm shifts are seldom initiated by those who benefit most from the current paradigm!