Mathematics really is a product of intuition: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/science/16angi.html?_r=1
Vindication
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To the newest crop of "network applications developers"
You are not capable of developing a networked application if you do not know what a socket is. Most custom-written server applications DO NOT integrate a web server, and most of us doing the server-side development have no desire to create one for you because you can’t figure out what the connect(), send(), and recv() functions do.
It ain't capitalism.
The trend these days is to set up free trade and deregulated capitalism as the cause of our present economic woes. Regulation is important in some contexts, such as in the environmental impact of industrial byproducts, but let me make something clear:
The financial firms are not capitalist.
The premise that makes capitalism work is that something of value is produced and the people who created it are rewarded with capital (i.e., the ability to leverage the value others provide) based on the assessment of that value against that of competing products or services. The best one, in theory, wins.
The financial industry is producing nothing of value. Its primary goal is to acquire more capital by what essentially amounts to arbitrage: purchase an asset when the price is low, sell it when the price increases. The word create does not factor into this at any point; the creation is being done by the companies that they are buying and selling.
Because they have divorced money from its meaning, it is no surprise that it looks all the same to them whether they use their own or someone else’s – so they’ve been using someone else’s and lending to others in turn.
The problem is that when you use someone else’s money, they can come calling at any time… and when you lend someone else yours, you always have to take into account that they may not be able to pay you back. What happened in the financial sector was that everyone had their hands in each other’s pockets and no one had produced any sort of actual value.
So stop calling it capitalism run amok. It isn’t capitalism to begin with.
Quantile v1.0 is complete.
Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a stock analysis and prediction application called Quantile for a freelance client. It is now finished. The numeric analysis tools are, anyway. Statistical predictors are going to be in v2.0, because teaching has left me too busy to continue work on it at the moment.
This is a bad market to train it on thanks to all of the nonsense going on in the financial industry and rippling through the market, but when/if the market stabilizes (and when I have more time), I am going to begin training it and performing dry runs. It’s a nifty little tool, and if the quantitative trading firms (all of which are foundering in the market right now, which I am getting a kick out of) thought I didn’t have the experience to do this when they contacted me several months ago, they were sadly mistaken. I’ve studied these sorts of algorithms extensively, and the mathematics that they consider difficult do not impress or faze me.
They wanted my work without compensating me for it – but my mind isn’t theirs to control or tap. It is my own, and it is time that people began to realize what that means. It is the asset that will preserve me through any market, for it can never lose its value and it is the source of all the wealth I possess. I could lose it all and build it right back up again, so long as I can think. I can apply this power to anyone I wish – but only in a fair agreement of mutual consent.
This is how capitalism should work. All the financial companies have demonstrated to me recently is how it should not.
Quick reduction of an opponent's homeworld in Spore through reverse terraforming.
I’ve been playing the space stage of Spore recently and one of my planets, which I had been in the process of terraforming, decided to randomly warm up (even though the planet was “stable”), brining the planet from “T2” to “T1”, and eventually to “T0”.
This had the effect of causing everything on the planet to go extinct and destroying all but one of the colonies I had placed there.
After the initial frustration subsided, I realized that this could be used as an excellent offensive weapon against heavily fortified enemy homeworlds. One good turn deserved another, and if the game was going to enforce funny physical rules, it had better enforce them consistently.
It was pretty simple: I bought the cloud vacuum, although any persistent terraforming tool would work. I went to an enemy homeworld, invariably a “T3” planet with 6 or 7 cities.
They attacked me, but my ship was faster. I simply kept flying around their planet and no one could catch me. I probably could not have reduced that planet by military means.
And while they chased me around their planet, I literally sucked the atmosphere out of it. It dropped from T3, to T2, to T1… and when it reached T0, every city but one blew up at once.
This isn’t a strategy if you want to take the planet intact. “Reverse terraforming” a world like that not only destroyed enemy colonies, but also caused all life on the planet to go extinct. Yes, with a cloud vacuum and a little bit of energy, I brought an apocalypse on an enemy world.
Now, I could use the cloud seeder tool to restore the atmosphere (one of the nice things about using one tool to do this is that you only need to use the opposite tool to reverse the effects), but then I’d need to repopulate all of the life on the planet before I could do that.
I thought it was an interesting strategy to use, however. Interesting enough to post about, in any case.
The game isn’t nearly as fun as it sounds. The space stage is probably the most fun (when you’re not fighting entire empires in your one ship or running all over the place trying to prevent your colonies from falling apart on their own), but the rest of the game is an epic fail. As in “supersized creature named fail”.
The Principle of Copying
It is human nature to emulate successful individuals and organizations. This includes traits not inherent to success. The propagation of nonessential traits is the only opportunity that an individual has to shape culture on a larger scale.
Internet-payable meters
The scramble to pay a parking meter is sort of ridiculous, as is the gamble of “put too little in and you could get ticketed, put too much in and you waste money”.
It seems that an easier model would be a meter that senses when you park and leave, then bills you for the total time you spent.
Or one you could pay online.
Or both.
Ready
The Polymath Foundation is now a 501(c)(3) organization. We’re finally ready to begin the long trek towards reforming education.
Brahms' Symphony no. 1 and the Superman theme.
There’s a part of Brahms’ Symphony no. 1 where the fanfare would lead perfectly into Superman’s theme if someone were to merge them.
Greatness is never measured by quantity.
The rage today is to boast about one’s publication count, the number of pieces one has written, or just generally the quantity of one’s productive output.
Greatness is never measured by quantity, however. What distinguished great individuals wasn’t how much output they created, but how novel the output was.
And yet everyone is so quantity-centric.