Gumptionology

Popularity Contest

2007-12-25T21:34:00.000-08:00

effect

apathetic

affect

integrity

metaphor

google

pretentious

awkward

eclectic

ambiguous

conundrum

whether

quixotic

albeit

melancholy

love

democracy

paradigm

didactic

hypocrite

These are a few of my favorite things. (Not -- many are often used in a hackneyed fashion. Still, it pays to increase your word power, and this list was based on queries, not use on the Web.)

"Meanwhile, slipping off the list were hypothesis, caveat, and gorgeous. Caveat only slipped to No. 23, so we're sure we haven't seen the last of this one."

Sort of a caveat caveat, eh?

Link.

Thanksgiving 2007: be glad you're not in the hospital

2007-11-22T21:38:00.000-08:00

I've got several things to blog about, after a long hiatus. First things first, though.

If you're one of the people who check in here hoping to see new stuff, or wondering wth is up, look forward to stuff in the near future; I am budgeting time every week to work on posts starting tomorrow.

As far as wth is up... I'm alive and feeling fine, though I had a moderately severe fall recently and am right now going through "max Q"... The pain after a spill seems to peak at around 48 hours post trauma and it appears to be right on schedule.

Random observation: celebrity proggies Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace Quaid apparently recently fell subject to a classic hospital goof: somebody figured a dosage wrong and gave them milli (1o^-3) instead of micro (10^-6) amounts -- of Heparin. Not good, as it's a potent anticoagulant.

Wild-*ssed thought: This just might actually be one of the few sensible reasons to use an English-style system for doses rather than metric. Slipped decimal points, and in particular milli vs micro errors, aka three orders of magnitude, happen in hospitals a lot more often than they should, often when there is time pressure, such as in neonatal units and emergency departments.

Problem with that is that there is no extant system of quirky drams and gills and fathoms for quantities that small. Bummer.

Notes that Clay Shirky probably already wrote better

2007-07-13T04:43:00.000-07:00

==Update: Welcome, Winds of Change readers!==
Check comment #1 on this thread, then pop back up here for the details of my category scheme. Thanks for visiting. Let's be civil, shall we?

In the cheery nonsequitur of an R. Crumb doodle: "Hi.... Let's get going!"

I want to get this out for review by my seven loyal readers even in rough form. I am probably building a square sandstone prototype of a Michelin racing radial that's already out there somewhere. Let me know if that's so.

I've been ruminating about some curious cultural concerns inspired by my stint "tending bar" (unpaid, it's a labor of love) over at Winds of Change.

Proposed: there are four kinds of online entities/personae, viz.:

Open
True Name used; or Nym (pseudonym/cognomen/nom de blog), if any, is [now] well known, or easily discoverable as one-to-one with True Name (barring hoaxes, ID theft).
Single-persona penalties and rewards. Deniability is circumscribed (modulo convincing evidence of impersonation/ID theft, etc.) Easily libeled / harassed / made afraid in some circumstances (e.g. Kathy Sierra kerfuffle, any number of other RL cases). Reputation and future data mining are up in the data cloud "forever" for all.
Seen as a "straight shooter" as long as there are no unpleasant surprises.
Iterated prisoner's dilemma is full strength or close to it.
Open entities might not make their backchannels readily available, but by Six Degrees mythos everybody has to have one, the trick is to know who/howto ask.

BAR STEREOTYPE (BS): The guy who comes into the bar and shows you his wallet full of kid pictures. You have his business card somewhere, so you know where he works.

Upstanding
Nym is a cognomen to a few insiders or none; is in place for reasons sufficient to the entity,
but there are mutltiple open channels of communication, and a stable ID/"Brand". Though True Name isn't common knowledge, some body of work is, and there is a working backchannel.
Deniability is still circumscribed; possibility of multiple, all Upstanding, Nyms for
different facets/roles across Web.
Potential for fewer penalties, fewer rewards.
ID/reputation of an Upstanding entity can still turn out to be built on sand.
Standard "what's he got to hide?" "You think you're cute with that fake name" etc. side-effects
In the long run, usage and pattern analysis will out; the True Name is vulnerable through an extension of the Deja News/Wayback Machine Effects.
Notion:
Upstanding-ness has degrees, but measure is not objective, it's contingent on
norms that "go without saying" for most people.
Conjecture:

relatively rich immersive environments such as Second Life, Worlds of Warcraft
can connect peers to trust/loyalty by activating neuro-anatomical wiring that is
unavailable to pure-text denizens of blogs/Facebook/Livejournal/etc.

Conjecture on prior conjecture:
what a crock!

BS: The guy you've played darts with in the bar for months--
but you only know his nickname. One of you owes the other for drinks.
Neither of you is worried about collecting.
You probably wouldn't loan him your car, but you might let him be the designated driver.

Obscure-Persistent
Nym only. "No Fixed Address": True Name / stable ID / link, e.g. working email, Nym-associated blog are all lacking. Without account- or post-by-post validation, any such entity will be be Obscure to all observers and habitués. With such, they will be less obscure to some.
Some observers don't know or care either way. For privacy's sake, most can't know on WoC; by design, only Marshals can see the IP and (claimed) email address.
ID unity/entity_continuity is inferred through tone, topics, IP addresses, quirks and habits.
Most sock puppets seem to be Obscure, though some qualify as Oblique.
Obscure entities seem to be more impulsive/less concerned with milieu than Open or Upstanding ones, though it is hard to measure that objectively.
Ironically, lack of backchannel/offlist comm makes vocal O-Ps anything BUT obscure in the long run, unless they are exceptionally well-mannered. This leads to a lowering of post quality due to noise and thread derailment or outright hijacking. Not that that is the only contributor to those.

BS (worst case): The guy who comes into the bar and turns his hearing aid off.
When he gets irritated, he wants the world to know about it.
Maybe it's why he's in the bar.

Oblique/Cryptic
Team pen names, comical parodical posts, other? May be obscure or not; validation of claimed ID under the pen name is generally difficult. High maintenance for readers. Eyes glaze over. Drive-bys are easiest. "Anonymous Coward" on Slashdot is a prime example; the many pen names of Kierkegaard serve as another. Also, of course, Bourbaki in mathematics.

BS: Hard to categorize. Could be a creep, could be a nebbish,
could be just some poor salaryman in for a quick nip after work,
with a joke to tell. Could be a geeeeeenius. So?

Write. Think. Learn.

2007-01-08T14:02:00.000-08:00

I'm still far from as gumptious as I wish to be; the lack of activity here indexes that.

My current "hammock" is that I'm just enough better off financially than I was four months ago that I can get by without really getting passionate about anything, including self-improvement, learning, making new friends... I did spend the New Years' weekend visiting friends and acquaintances who have a higher setpoint than I, and it was invigorating, but the buzz has ebbed a week later.

Now comes this, via Kathy Sierra over at "Creating Passionate Users": a slideshow by Michael A. Covington: "How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily" .

I haven't absorbed it all, and I sure haven't applied it yet, but it appears to be good stuff, including some commentary on epistemology (the study of how we know what we know). Mmm, yummy epistemology.

Someone (I think it was Charles Fort) once said "to measure a circle, begin anywhere".

When I'm stuck in ruminating about my failings and limitations, there's little room for improvement -- the possibility of change gets crowded out. I'm noticing I've spent another large chunk of time there lately.

I won't apologize; nobody asked me to do that :) . I'll just make a silent pledge to myself, and see if the result shows up here and elsewhere. Hint: it will involve writing, thinking and learning.

Honeywell Nobel Interactive Studio

2006-11-20T13:08:00.000-08:00

Via Newscientist.com I find that Honeywell has a website that features video interviews of and lectures by Nobel laureates. I anticipate many hours of ~~distraction~~ edification. Joe-Nort says check it out. Honeywell Nobel Interactive Studio.

Anglospherics and "medical refugees"

2006-10-21T07:18:00.000-07:00

In times past I've researched getting various things medical from various places not-near-me.

Things such as LASIK/Visex-Wavefront (the latter being really cool) for my eyes, dental work, and so on. I've always thought mostly in terms of getting the work done in what has uncharitably been labeled "fly-over country" -- the Midwest of the U.S.; I've also considered getting prescriptions from Canada.

It would not occur to me to get elective / cosmetic surgery done in South America, say; and the idea of getting some very annoying floaters taken care of in the Former Soviet Union by having my vitreous humor removed, ultrafiltered, and returned, as was once advertised, gives me a frisson of fear. Ditto, if a bit less so, for getting the floaters zapped with a YAG laser in China. One trouble is the fundamental long-term outcomes of the exact practices used. Another is the difficulty and cost of followup or having the original doctor or team handle complications, if any.

Comes now word from Wired.com of news from the NEJM that India is thinking of creating a new form of visa "specifically for medical refugees" -- such as one man who reportedly got a cardiac surgical procedure that goes for $200k here in the states. It's said the procedure cost $6700 there. No word on the ancillary transport, lodging and opportunity costs, but it's implied that he didn't have to sell his house. And it would appear it was a full-on standard procedure with adequate aftercare.

Expect more of this sort of thing, even if travel gets harder and harder. It might drive prices up in India.

All our Bayesian are belong to them

2006-10-08T21:51:00.000-07:00

This just forwarded from a friend (emphasis and added link(s) mine)... ...and no, he doesn't work for Google. I ...think... that this is just a coincidence...

Apparently, I offend their chief.

No, I'm not including the probably-a- poison-pill GIF that was attached.

What coder or designer among us doesn't thrill to recognize eternal verities such as:

"you want your boss told you support in your own code."

We've ALL been there, haven't we? I know that *I* always wanted my boss told me support in *my* own code.

Did I ever get? NO! I had no. I had to move every zig! For great justice.

The appended Bayesian word-salad evidently based on a stroll through the HeadFirst stuff made me laugh. I hope you get at least a smirk out of it, Kathy!

{Ed: "Kathy" here is Kathy Sierra, who blogs at "Creating Passionate Users"}

....

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: V____ W___ <nowayamigonnagivethisjerkafreelink@uh-uh.not>
Date: Oct 8, 2006 4:07 PM
Subject: you offend our chief
To:

more complex. deep understanding of why someone struggles Design Patterns, you'll avoid science, and learning theory, to learn how those You'll easily counter with your

principles will help patterns look in Singleton isn't as simple as it sounds, how the Factory to learn how those You'll easily counter with your a design paddle pattern.
when to use them, how or on the real relationship (and impress cocktail party guests) be wrong (and what the embarrassment of thinking

that you can hold your to do instead). You want environment. In other support in your own code. Something more fun. used in the Java API
you have. You know
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about inheritance might You want to learn the
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own with your co-worker

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environment. In other a design paddle pattern. , and how to exploit better at solving software
and experience of others, your time is too important
reinvent the wheel

brain in a way that sticks.

The problem is "The Problem Is..."

2006-10-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

Quoth Dr Brin, recently:

The way to truly crush intolerance is the way parents deal with the hysterics of small children. By taking the small hammer-blows, absorbing the tantrum, firmly disallowing any larger harm, and wrapping the frenetic soul in an embrace of patient confidence.

"Calm down. The only way to attain freedom of action is if you learn not to hate."

I replied

In the abstract, you're right. But the parent-child presuppositions one needs to hold to believe this is the sure-fire strategy are vast. And human reactions being what they are, one person's "disallowing" is another person's overreaction / overreaching / warcrime.

Me, I'm only half-vast, and I suspect a sheaf of strategies is a better approach, though hedging the existential risks (as they eventually appear indisputable / too-clear-to-mistake) against one another might turn out to be impossible. Some say the world will end in ice, etc. If it gets too weird, maybe it's just Game Over for "us", whoever "us" is for you or me.

But I'm programmed, in a way similar to the general Western Civ orneriness you've pointed out, to be suspicious of anyone who says "the [P]roblem is..." where human nature and millions or billions of people are involved.

So, maybe, as I like to say,

"The problem is 'the problem is...'" :)

I.e., to circumscribe the situation quickly in order to name a fix quickly carries deep and frequently hidden risks.

But we're wired to want a Single Narrative. So it's always a tough call.

Thus the power of messy, quasi, hemisemidemicoalitions and sheaves of strategies. The hope is that a lot of "us" won't be very wrong for too long.

Somebody who used to post on the Extropy list used to have this sig, obviously influenced by you:

"I am not here to have an argument. I am here as part of a civilization. Sometimes I forget."

A few of the commenters on Winds of Change FREQUENTLY makes me forget. But that's their plan, and I've learned to adopt Dr Brin's suggested strategy with them. Smother them with parenting until they either grow up or ship out. Either one is OK with me.

QOTD: Reality and reliability

2006-10-06T20:55:00.000-07:00

The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors.

--Hannah Arendt

Neat Tech: "Shadow Illuminator"

2006-09-04T18:44:00.000-07:00

Update: Well, dog my cats. Looks as if NASA Ames and some other folks have a competing product and a patent or five to do the kind of thing I mention below, based on Retinex. Interesting. I wonder what close comparison between TruView and Shadow Illuminator would yield. The Ames "Visual Servo" pages are also intriguing.

Too cool not to blog about: Shadow Illuminator. I hope this guy and the people who are working on implementing the algorithm in silicon make a good chunk of change from it. You can submit your own pic and the site will crunch it to produce a picture with the areas in shadow automagically made more visible. If your image is low noise and not highly compressed, you can get remarkable results with fewer artifacts than some of the old typical computer image manipulation tricks. Here's some examples of the potential source-image gotchas. As is mentioned at the top of that page, this tech, or something similar, has potentially huge implications for machine vision. Just think how much more clever the next generation Roomba could be! Ahem.

I'm not sure if any of the algorithm applies Land's Retinex Theory -- especially to really poorly lit areas. If not, there's a bit of low-hanging fruit left and I declare that I thought of it. So I hope that piece can fall in the non-patentable arena But I'm not sufficiently gumptional at the moment to check for priors in the USPTO. [Later: Whoops. turns out several other people {warning: PDF file} already have done work on just that. Oh well, at least my instincts for interesting solutions seem good. ;\]

One thing I want to do some time is try to make up Retinex-style pictures with a camera that can pick up infrared (as many digital cameras can if you remove any IR filter they might have). Substituting an IR channel for a red channel might be interesting.

--Nort

PS: Yes, long time no blog. I've been focusing on other things. There is a backlog of things I want to write about, and some other people are doing some of the work I wanted to do. I'll be posting more about that in my "Wimpy Pseudo Blogroll" soon.

QOTD: The general lesson

2006-06-02T16:09:00.000-07:00

The general lesson that I take away from this bug is humility: It is hard to write even the smallest piece of code correctly, and our whole world runs on big, complex pieces of code.

--Joshua Bloch

Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken. Read all about it.

This chastening reminder is handy when I get frustrated to the point of apoplexy over things like lost work due to Blogger bugs. And other human endeavors. Bloch also says:

A bug can exist for half a century despite our best efforts to exterminate it. We must program carefully, defensively, and remain ever vigilant.

A jagged little pill, especially for the AI / singularity crowd.

On the other hand, it makes me feel better that I can find two silver linings:

A constrained-wordsize (say 8 bits per word) test case could have found this bug with an exhaustive-search test script a long time ago, and that I can see that makes me feel retrospectively smart.
If God-knows-how-many smart folks could miss this one for four decades, maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself when I discover my own errors.

QOTD + homily: Three from Seneca on anger

2006-05-17T17:02:00.000-07:00

This relates to serenity. And to Serenity, for that matter.

My homie Seneca was the rizzle dizzle... He was more or less the Brainiac of the first half of Century 1 (I hear he lived until about 65 A.D., though some say he died much earlier). Here are three from the vault:

"Anger..."

"...is like those ruins which smash themselves on what they fall."

"...if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it."

"...[is] an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured."

--L. Seneca, fl. 10-60 A.D.(?)

These meditations are helping me deal with stress. Really. And that's cool. Temperament traits are in large part habits, say I. And re-directing them after decades of practice? That takes practice -- not the promise of practice, nor the plan, but the real deal. Sayin' ain't doin'. Rem, non spem. That's Latin for "the thing, not the hope."

Getting to where you can remember to (and, more truly speaking, more habitually act in) practice? Well, how do you figure Sisyphus started?

He didn't start by talking himself out of it, I know that. Those of us with "strong Won'ts" can dismiss change with a single muttered noise of deprecation. And that yields -- what?

It's almost a Yoda thing. There is no "try": do, or do not.

A Tibetan Buddhist of my acquaintance once told me that the universe is destroyed and re-created 64,000 times a second. If he's right, that means all of us are, too. Just pick a couple more times each day to take advantage. And remember that you did, and give attention to the fact that actually doing it was (a) a success and (b) less pain than you thought it'd be. Lather, rinse, repeat. Pick something small sometimes.

Cf.: Indignant self dopes, Covey's "Sharpen the saw", Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, The "strong Won't" , Picking on something your own size (all links to be included later)

My Wimpy Pseudo Blogroll, IIII: "Passionate Users"; "Reflective Happiness"

2006-04-21T22:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, the erudite among you will note that I use the classical, non-Julian form of Roman numeral four. The rest of you will just have to figger it out. A one, and-a-two:

1) I found this blog by way of Winds Of Change. "Creating Passionate Users" is the name, but that, as with many good blogs, doesn't really describe where the author[s] go[es].

LATER: Whoops! The "About" page mentions three contributors: Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates, and Eric Freeman. Apologies to all for my earlier error. P.S. The pic on this post is from their site.

Recent gumption-relevant posts appear to include

As might be implied by my desultory posting, I am at chronically low gumption myself these days. I think Kathy [, Bert and Eric]'s blog might help me some there. And I'm looking into this one:

2) One fellow who has devoted his professional career to exploring "learned helplessness" and its alternatives is Dr. Martin Seligman. I expect any good search engine will point you to his stuff. He and some associates have recently unveiled the new, improved Reflective Happiness site.

Sure, some people give "happiness" a bad rap, but I think it's clear that habitually helpless, anxious, depressed or angry people don't always get the gumption, flow, or results they could if they were only episodically in those states. I believe the chosen expression, Reflective Happiness, is aimed at puncturing the notion that happy == fatuous. It ain't necessarily so.

Yes, it's a subscription service. No, I have no financial interest in it. No, I am not a subscriber (yet). If/when I know more, I'll report.

As a final note, some correspondents have asked me to post more personal-experience anecdotes. I think the expression one person used was "Why don't you get off your high horse and tell us something!"

Hmm! In the old days I was never mistaken for a cavalryman. Maybe it is time to get more down to earth for a spell.

Analogies all the way down?

2006-04-14T15:18:00.000-07:00

There's a fuzzy story, nicknamed "Turtles all the way down". It's said that someone buttonholed Thomas Huxley (or Bertrand Russell, or William James, or someone else) after a lecture, and put forth the proposition that our Earth, really flat, is resting on the back of a giant turtle; the question (by Huxley, Russell, or whoever) of what that turtle is resting on is answered dismissively, "It's turtles all the way down, young man!".

Douglas Hofstadter has a notion that for human cognition, "It's analogies all the way down." His Stanford lecture "Analogy as the Core of Cognition" is the place I first ran across it. He calls this notion

a refrain that I’ve chanted quite oft in the past, to wit:

One should not think of analogy-making as a special variety of reasoning (as in the dull and uninspiring phrase “analogical reasoning and problem-solving,” a long-standing cliché in the cognitive-science world), for that is to do analogy a terrible disservice. After all, reasoning and problem-solving have (at least I dearly hope!) been at long last recognized as lying far indeed from the core of human thought. If analogy were merely a special variety of something that in itself lies way out on the peripheries, then it would be but an itty-bitty blip in the broad blue sky of cognition. To me, however, analogy is anything but a bitty blip — rather, it’s the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition — analogy is everything, or very nearly so, in my view.

End of oft-chanted refrain. If you don’t like it, you won’t like what follows.

Fairly far into the lecture (or perhaps it's a chautauqua), he says stuff that reminds me of the fun I have when I and a good friend are thought-riffing; and of how adrift I feel when that sort of thing becomes too infrequent:

Note that what I have just described is not problem-solving, which has traditionally played such a large role in modeling of thought and been tightly linked with “analogical reasoning”; no, everyday thought is not problem-solving or anything that resembles it at all; rather, it is a nonrandom stroll through long-term memory, mediated by high-level perception (which is simply, to echo myself, another name for analogy-making).

To be sure, thought does not generally take place in a sealed-off vat or an isolation chamber; most of the time, external events are constantly impinging on us. Therefore the purely self-driven flow that the “central loop” would suggest is just half of the story — it is the contribution from within one’s private cognitive system. The other half — the contribution from outside — comes from inanimate objects impinging on one’s senses (skyscrapers and sunsets and splashes, for instance), from animate agents seen mostly as objects (mosquitos that one swats at, people that one tries not to bang into as one hastens down a crowded sidewalk), or from other cognitive agents (conversations with friends, articles read in the paper, email messages, scenes in movies, and so on).

I find the themes Hofstadter explores there analogous to some of the work of George Lakoff, who, before he became a popular lecturer with a political agenda, seemed entirely capable of doing actual science. His Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (hereafter, WFaDT) was a breakthrough work in cognitive linguistics; the later Metaphors We Live By, written with Mark Johnson, is a bit more accessible and builds on his earlier work.

I'll save my carping about his slide into partisanship for later. Maybe for never. :)

Work like Hofstadter's and Lakoff's, along with the recently-popular "mirror neuron" stuff, seems to shed light on a lot of things, from the "homunculus" model -- the little guy sitting in a control seat behind the eyeballs, running things -- to why thinking is so hard.

My current take is that even if mirror neurons are not the big deal that Ramachandran made of them in this Edge piece, there's something to the idea that metaphors and analogies are deeply intertwingled with human thought, and indeed with the brain hardware we think with.

Why does this matter? Lakoff makes the case in WFaDT that for much of history, philosophy had a tacit premise that the trick of perfecting philosophy was to get "the" categories right. The notional grail: there's an inherent taxonomy of categories, and once that's debugged, human perception will perforce be subject to ultimate reason.

This gets called into question if all our symbolic thought is running as quasi-opportune patterns overloaded on nonsymbolic hardware.

I suspect abstract categories just don't map the way the color red does. I suspect that an awful lot of "abstract" human thought isn't as highflown as many of us wish. Perhaps I state the obvious.

I have a lot I'd like to say about this stuff, but it will have to wait for another time. For now I'll close with another excerpt from the Hofstadter lecture.

This viewpoint may be overly ambitious, and may even — horrors! -- be somewhat wrong, but I have observed that many good ideas start out by claiming too much territory for themselves, and eventually, when they have received their fair share of attention and respect, the air clears and it emerges that, though still grand, they are not quite so grand and all-encompassing as their proponents first thought. But that’s all right. As for me, I just hope that my view finds a few sympathetic readers. That would be a fine start.

Read the whole thing. He goes interesting places.

My Wimpy Pseudo Blogroll, III: Neo-Neocon

2006-03-22T22:38:00.000-08:00

Worth a look. I'll let my abstract-intellectual mantle slip a bit here: I share some sentiments with this person.

More than anything I have been struck by the following, which also serves as a (slightly prolix) Quote of the Day:

I always find it curious when people act as though, by dint of supporting some of Bush's foreign policies (which I most definitely do), a person is therefore responsible for, and needs to account for and differentiate him/herself from, every utterance made by every person on the entire spectrum of the right.

.... Your feeling that I need to do this might be an indication, I believe, that you feel that each movement is a monolithic whole, and that anyone who espouses some sort of agreement with someone on a certain "side" is therefore responsible for what everyone who supports that person has said, as though we all march in lockstep.

This is someone who appears to be doing her level best to not just be "rearranging her prejudices" -- and to be working on others', as well. Need I say I approve? I do, heartily.

Is the bell (curve) tolling for "light bulbs"?

2006-02-16T18:01:00.000-08:00

Edmund Scientific's Optical boys might have developed the much-wished-for halogen/HID-killer LED. [Press release...]

Update 2006.02.16: some info on how they claim to do it.

Here we go. If this stuff is actually manufacturable, this is the knee of the incandescent lamp curve... and not far from the knee for fluorescents, too. W00t.

I've already seen merch in the local hardware store that has labeling implicitly apologizing for not being LED. Is this buggywhip time for incandescent lamps? Will they be laboratory items only soon? If you need a continuous spectrum they're hard to beat, so they'll still be used in theater and film (production and presentation, both). Apart from that...? People worried about surviving EMP: vacuum tubes resulted from the Edison effect observed in incandescent lamps. And that's about all I can think of.

I really want someone to write the history of this project. Not just the Edmund breakthrough, although that might make a book in itself, I don't know. The White LED was effectively unthinkable about 30 years ago, AFAIK. But I'd love to find out I was wrong.

I am sure there are studies in gumptionology to be found in this history, at least as much so as in, say, Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, q.v.

The biggest lesson in gumptionology I got from that book was a bit like the line from the movie Blade Runner: "The candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long." There is a famous burnout quote mentioned at the bottom of the article linked immediately above. What price gumption (especially in Flow Zero)? Coupland's Microserfs talks about the seductive qualities of being "Version 1.0" -- of doing something groundbreaking.

Groundbreaking can be mindbreaking. No one else can tell you whether that was worth it. And grinding and pumping out 40-hour days is no guarantee of "success" -- what exactly is that, again?

"I Have a Dream", Part N+1

2006-02-15T22:49:00.000-08:00

As my dear departed friend Dan Niemi would say: OUT-STANDING!

Of course this could turn out badly. Of course there are huge potential stumbling blocks--read the whole linked article, which deals with some of them.

But I bet The Hip Gan is smilin' mighty, mighty big tonight.

[Emphasis in the quoted text is mine]

Via the CSM and others:

Under a new constitutional amendment, private schools, colleges, and professional training institutes that operate without government funding will be obliged to set aside more than one-quarter of their seats for students from India's "untouchable" lower castes or Dalits, as well as other socially and economically disadvantaged groups.

The amendment, which will apply to admissions for the 2006 academic year, could directly affect the lives and futures of at least 70 percent of India's more than 1.2 billion people.

In addition to Dalits, who make up one-quarter of the population, there are millions of Indians from poor tribes and disadvantaged groups collectively known as other backward castes (OBCs). According to one estimate, approximately 113 million children between the ages of 6 and 14 are now eligible for reserved seats in private schools.

Hard Things: Admitting ignorance when stakes are high

2006-02-02T21:56:00.000-08:00

OK, I'm taking off the white gloves for this one. We have a long way to go on such public matters as "Climate Change". LiveScience published this a while back, but AFAIK it's still current.

The bottom line, according to a group of experts not involved in any of these studies: Scientists don't know much about how sunlight interacts with our planet, and until they understand it, they can't accurately predict any possible effects of human activity on climate change.

BINGO. Read it all, for it is good. Even such worthies as Dr Brin seem to take Michael Crichton's most recent book State of Fear to task, along with taking him to task -- such being human nature. But, modulo the cardboard (and card-carrying) pseudo-eco-baddies, what I'd paraphrase him as saying in that book is "We really don't know a hell of a lot about a great deal of crucially-important stuff, and all the hand-wringing and hand-waving isn't bringing us any nearer to finding out." He is not saying that humans are not messing things up, either. As one small example, in a speech for the National Press Club this year ("The Impossibility of Prediction", located on this page), he said:

I still believe that environmental awareness is desperately important. The environment is our shared life support system, it is what we pass on to the next generation, and how we act today has consequences—potentially serious consequences—for future generations. But I have also come to believe that our conventional wisdom is wrongheaded, unscientific, badly out of date, and damaging to the environment. Yellowstone National Park has raw sewage seeping out of the ground. We must be doing something wrong.

In an afterword in State of Fear, Crichton writes:

Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be a natural phenomenon. Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be man-made. Nobody knows how much warming will occur in the next century.

But it feels good to be doing something, and what if humans are messing things up -- there's no time to waste!, and, and, and.

Because, it's tacitly assumed, the only alternatives to it being beyond doubt that [recent human activities are causing a measurable increase in the average temperature of the planet that presents hazards to life as we know it] are:

You're an ignorant or selfish stooge
You're a selfserving fat cat. Finally, the really scary one...
We're all totally powerless!

Right? Right? Those are the only alternatives, right?!

Humans. I weep for the species. And for mainstream media such as Knight-Ridder, who call up a bunch of scientists that are at the front of their Fil0faxes and (surprise!) mostly find opprobrium for State of Fear. And of course, for Dr Crichton.

Note that I have bones to pick with the works of Dr Crichton, as well. But that's for another time.

"What else could it be but..." works best if you don't listen afterwards. They go together like peas and carrots. OTOH, "We [just] don't know..." can be, or sound like, a cop-out.

Coaxing feedstock from the research funding trough can proceed apace either way.

Are they [/we] indignant self-dopes?

2006-01-31T23:57:00.000-08:00

The estimable David Brin has a blog. And he belongs on my blogroll. But that's not what this post is about. This post is about a piece Dr B did not long ago. It nails some corners down on an idea others including myself have speculated idly about: emotional state-seeking as analogous to so-called "drug-seeking behavior" -- and perhaps more than merely analogous -- perhaps identical to.

David is speculating "ah, with vigah!" Viz:

An Open Letter to Researchers of Addiction, Brain Chemistry & Social Psychology

Though Dr B often delights in being provocative and contrarian, he usually does it with grace and style and substance, and I give him mad Roman Legionary props for that. He's more worthy than your run-of-the-mill gadfly, by far. More a worthy gadversary. When I disagree with him, I must think hard about why and how. And that makes him a gadsend!

Here's the money quote re self-righteousness as endogenous self-medication, near the end:

Why the Issue Has Grown Urgent

We have entered an era of rising ideological division and "culture war" that increasingly stymies our knack at problem-solving. Nowadays, few adversarial groups seem capable of negotiating peaceful consensus solutions to problems, especially with opponents that are perceived as even more unreasonably dogmatic than they are. This cycle is often driven by the irate stubbornness of a few vigorous leaders. After all, the indignant have both stamina and dedication, helping them take high positions in advocacy organizations, from Left to Right.

Might recent exaggerated levels of bilious social division be partly attributed to an all-too human tendency to fall into addictive patterns of self-doping, by wallowing in a pleasurable mental state? A state that undermines our ability to empathize with opponents, accept criticism, or negotiate practical solutions to problems?

May I boldly suggest that this insidious type of reinforcement may cause vastly more overall social harm than every illegal drug on the street?

We're probably a long way from proving anything about this stuff, and of course people will be indignant about the suggestions they see as implicit in all of that. What rich irony. Send in the clown car. Don't bother, it's here.

Phrases: Pumpkin Eaters

2006-01-25T20:24:00.000-08:00

I first heard this expression in a Jethro Tull song. I have come up with my own definition; perhaps I'll follow up with some actual research to see what (if any) provenance can be determined. The phrase is the title of a 1964 movie about a woman who stays pregnant as often as she can, but I think my definition has more utility.

By my lights, a "pumpkin eater" is a gullible person, one who (figuratively) can swallow most anything, and doesn't seem to be daunted by whatever the pain of doing so is.

It helps if it fits in with prior goals or worldview, and of course it helps to have a scattershot approach to reality. Some possible examples could include: people who think all of Michael Moore's work, all the X-Files, all the utterances of a given politician, or all the Late Night Coast to Coast radio shows are great and beyond criticism.

The much-bandied term "idiotarian" is a bit more pejorative, but I'm not sure it's stronger in meaning. I like "pumpkin eater" because it hasn't become fightin' words. Yet. I think.

Note that the term doesn't denote a country bumpkin, just someone who is , as Viv Stanshall said in the spoken-word piece "Big Shot", "credulous as hell."

Eric Drexler used to talk about something he called "bogophilia". On that, more RSN.

My Wimpy Pseudo Blogroll, II: Sleep Dirt

2006-01-23T09:44:00.000-08:00

The connections between sleep and mood are well known, and curiously circuitous. I have been wondering how and whether to tackle this, since mood has a big impact on gumption. Enter Circadiana, which appears to be a most worthy blog, and not merely because it gets me off the hook. Its author Bora Zivkovik belongs on my blogroll, as soon as I get around to creating the real thing. A hat tip to MakeZine's issue # 03 for the pointer.

'I love Miss Frizzle from the cartoon "The Magic School Bus". She always says "Make connections, kids, make connections!"'

Amen to that. His top post today tries to connect some dots between sleep and mood in an interesting way. Extended sleep deprivation seems strongly correlated with reduced immune system function. This is more grist for that mill.

Joe-Nort says check it out. Circadiana