April 25, 2006
Taking a break
On May 6, this blog will have been appearing almost daily for a couple of years.
The text alone for the entries runs to 2.5 M of ASCII. Each day I clean the junk comments and trackbacks away, leave some more content on a disk at our ISP, spend time writing stuff down that'll be forgotten soon, perhaps post a picture relatives and friends can look at once or twice.
Many of you have added your comments to entries. Thanks for those, and thanks for reading along.
It's time to take a break.
Posted by Mark at 09:26 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
April 24, 2006
Rough circles
This morning as I rolled into work on the bike, the weather was great. As I knew a huge pile of things to do awaits me here, I decided to enjoy the ride.
Saturday I replaced the SPD pedals on the mountain bike. The new pedals grip the cleats better. I tried an exercise suggested in one of the articles Andy found. The exercise consists of putting the bike in an easy gear and using only one leg to pedal. Very strange. I'm definitely not making perfectly smooth circles yet. There's sort of a whoosh on the downstroke and nothing on parts of the upstroke.
Posted by Mark at 09:03 AM | TrackBack
April 20, 2006
High Mach
Digg had a link to this test of how Machiavellian you are. My score was 63/100.
You are a high Mach, you endorse Machiavelli's opinions.
That didn't surprise me much. To get a low score, you'd need to be twistedly Machiavellian enough not to admit to yourself that you're manipulative.
Posted by Mark at 02:15 PM | TrackBack
Nightmares
Yet another early morning of eerie nightmares. For the last few days the nightmares have involved ghoulish surgical violence, moods of capitulation, despair that persists on awaking.
I went to bed almost an hour earlier than usual. Managed to read about a page before feeling too tired to focus, but then could not fall asleep normally, and instead tossed and turned.
It took almost half an hour to get out of bed. I wondered about people who say they like to lie in their beds in the morning, going back to sleep after they wake up. Nath says she likes to stay in bed. People who do must not be lying there feeling crushed by depression or illness. Instead they actually feel better than when they get up and get going. Amazing.
Posted by Mark at 06:32 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 11, 2006
~45:00/~145
As my right shin is bothering me, I planned to ride, but ended up not even riding at noon. Instead I measured myself riding home, and doubled that to get about 45 minutes at a heart rate of about 145 for the 4 short bike legs of the trip.
My muscles are exhausted. I notice that more on the bike than on foot. On foot the soreness and stiffness is obvious, but the lack of muscle power is not. On the bike the lack of muscle power is clear. So Matt was no doubt right. The best training I can do right now is to recover.
Posted by Mark at 09:04 PM | TrackBack
March 31, 2006
Atheists America's most distrusted
A study by some folks at the University of Minnesota identified atheists as America's most distrusted minority.
I've gotten mail on the subject and seen the article mentioned in various places around the blogosphere. This may be one of those studies that gets more attention outside than inside the United States.
What was the context?
From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in "sharing their vision of American society." Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.
That got me thinking about how the methodology. Did they have some students make these calls?
Hello?Mr. Craig?
Yes.
Hi, this is Jane Smith from the University of Minnesota. We're conducting a telephone survey of Americans like yourself, looking at which minorities you consider least trustworthy...
Phone marketing people. No, make that people who manage phone marketing people.
...Huh? Let me ask you a few questions and get your rankings for these minority groups.
Well, we were just sitting down to dinner...
That's okay. This will only take a few minutes. Question 1. In order of most to least, how do the following groups rate at sharing your vision of American society?
According to one of the researchers, apparently only 3% of people in the US are atheists.
Posted by Mark at 04:20 PM | TrackBack
March 29, 2006
Stuck, part II
As I only had one book going home on the train, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, I came unstuck by pressing on. In essence I gave up on the theoretical underpinnings of the Metaphysics of Quality. Chapter 8 went by in a haze.
The next chapter was going okay this evening until Tim came up for the third time to tell me he couldn't go to sleep until I printed a copy of the periodic table of the elements for his personal use. Emma didn't want to go to bed until I'd quizzed her on a few simple additions.
Nath took Diane this afternoon to the chiropractor, who gently realigned Diane's spine and relieved tension in Diane's neck. The chiropractor asked Diane if she was a little girl or a big girl. Diane said she was a little girl. The chiropractor suggested maybe the problem started when Diane got to sleep in her mom's bed during the ski holiday, and managed to monopolize Mom all day, each day that week.
When they returned home from vacation, Diane had to sleep in her own bed and time share with her brother and sister. She had to go back to school. The only time she could get Mom's undivided attention just for her was in the middle of the night.
So the chiropractor recommended what we already knew, which is to ignore Diane in the middle of the night, and to pay some attention to her, by herself, during the day. Easier said than done, of course. The alternatives are probably worse, though.
Posted by Mark at 09:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Stuck
The stack of books in progress is growing deeper. I'm now interrupting Kafka's short stories, which interrupted Schlesinger's work on Andrew Jackson's presidency, which interrupted a collection of George Steiner's essays, to read Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig. I'm stuck at p. 122:
There's a principle in physics that if a thing can't be distinguished from anything else it doesn't exist.
Up to that point I was reading along with minor to major disagreements here and there, suspecting that Pirsig's going to get around logic by sleight of mind. Not that he's going to do it intentionally. He'll be just as amazed by the magic as the rest of us.
Yet here he seemed to be laying out axioms from which he's going to mount his attack on the empiricist position. You sort of want him to win, because you feel, too, that the empiricists have missed the point.
Then you realize that if you take the first sentence of his argument at face value, you have to agree that the universe doesn't exist. Hmm.
Posted by Mark at 12:47 PM | TrackBack
Shortening lifespan
Forbes.com has an article about how CEOs really ought to manage their stress.
"We've thought for a long time that type A personalities were predisposed to cardiovascular problems, but it turns out it's those who have increased rage and negative stress who have a higher risk for heart disease," says Dr. Woodson Merrell, M. Anthony Fischer director of Integrative Medicine at the Continuum Center for Health and Healing at Beth Israel hospital in New York City.
From here on in, my aim is to leave a good looking corpse. The number 1 suggestion on how to reduce stress mentions marathon running. Another suggestion is to make money. "Having money calms many worries." They also suggest scheduling vacations. True, I have a few days left to schedule.
Posted by Mark at 10:03 AM | TrackBack
March 21, 2006
Life expectancy
Seeing the Digg, I tried the life expectancy calculator.
Depending on whether I consider my parents alive or dead after reaching age 80, I get a life expectancy between 75 and 81 years. My personality type is a big strike against me.
Since retirement will start at about age 70 by the time I reach that age, I shouldn't be a big drag on the system. The lean period will come between the time I become unemployable, age 50?, and the age at which I can retire. By eating only what I can get out of the dumpster at the back of Walmart, I could at once reduce my life expectancy the rest of the way, save post-peak-oil gas by grocery "shopping" at my place of employment, and save money. It'll beat growing potatoes in my back yard. And it'll keep the children from having to pay for my retirement.
Nathalie's going to live to 102. She's thinking about everything she'll be able to do without me for the last 30 years of her life.
Posted by Mark at 10:09 PM | TrackBack
March 20, 2006
Paul Graham on competence
Perhaps I already quoted this from Paul Graham's essay on Great Hackers, but it's worth quoting again.
I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.
What am I great at, then, if I'm mystified at how incompetent I seem?
Posted by Mark at 09:34 PM | TrackBack
March 15, 2006
When to rest
Matt Swift came to my office after a hard ride up to Revel (and then further uphill). His face looked a bit red. He must have given himself quite a workout. He'd been riding with the contraption he puts on his wheel to calculate wattage, and had been determined to maintain a certain output.
We got to talking. There's not anybody around work who wants to run with me or ride with Matt. He won't run, since he figures it hurts his cycling. Maybe I ought to ride with him. It's usually a knock-down, drag-out training session.
He's still working to convince me to do the Marmotte. Says that unlike a marathon, I'll be fine for training only a day or so after the race. I don't however think it would be sane to do that ride without some training to learn to pace myself up hills. 5000 m of climbing over 174 km.
My question is how can I do that training and still recover from running 6 days out of 7? And where would I find the time?
Posted by Mark at 09:25 PM | TrackBack
March 12, 2006
Quid pro quo
Did you notice that knowing the meaning of quid pro quo in English could potentially lead you to a quid pro quo (in French) with a French speaker using the same Latin phrase?
Posted by Mark at 09:16 AM | TrackBack
March 02, 2006
The gentle nature of bureaucracies
While I ate dinner last night I watched the beginning of a television program about Nikita Khrushchev coming into the 20th Communist Party congress and speaking out against Stalin.
According to the Wikipedia article on Khrushchev, this guy's rival candidate for the top spot in the USSR ended up getting executed a few short months after Khrushchev won. Khrushchev's children were on this documentary explaining how scared Dad was about making his big Stalin speech.
Funny how this guy worked, and how he ascended to the head of what billed itself as a people's republic, a state for the working man.
Posted by Mark at 06:59 PM | TrackBack
February 09, 2006
How accurate is Wikipedia
As BBC News notes, the recent big hullabaloo is over members of the US congress editing their own biographies. Although the Wikipedia folks were stirred up, it's hardly surprising that some of those having the drive to win the hugest popularity contests of all would not feel undue moral discomfort about adjusting the online record. They probably see it as setting the facts straight.
What I found interesting in the article was this statement, "A December 2005 study by the British journal Nature found it [Wikipedia] was about as accurate on science as the Encyclopaedia Britannica."
In a way looking things up in Wikipedia is like getting support using Google to find answers in mailing lists, which is inevitably how it ends up when you're fixing something. That's an amazing realization when you think that, "I read online that...," is a euphemism for, "Here comes a tall tale."
Maybe the end has come for normally published reference works. And I can stop creating man pages.
Posted by Mark at 09:18 PM | TrackBack
February 08, 2006
No high blood pressure (on Saturday)
The cardiologist said with a smile that everything is okay because he didn't find anything. I didn't have the courage to punch him in the nose. He probably didn't mean it the way I took it, anyway. That was just expert talk for, "This problem is not worth explaining, so we're going to quit investigating now." In those cases you're supposed to trust the expert and respect his judgement.
Over the 22 hours 38 minutes I wore the portable device to measure blood pressure, systolic pressure was 125 on average, diastolic 77, with during the day 84.1% of systolic pressure measurements however over 120, and 95.5% of diastolic pressure measurements over 70. The highest measured systolic was 143. The lowest minimum diastolic was 54. My average measured heart rate was 59, ranging from a low of 46 to a high of 88.
Although I'm no expert, I surmise that if it were the last remaining plausible cause besides stress, too much salt in my diet, it would've shown up on Saturday as well. So by process of elimination, I conclude the measurements taken so far capture stress-related high blood pressure, and that doctors can do nothing about that but make me more alarmed.
My right hand was shaking involuntarily when I sat down to wait in a vacant office at the cardiologist's, and is still shaking a bit. My head hurts already. My eyes feel tired and heavy. Last night I had a few fits of trouble getting my breath, and found it difficult to fall asleep despite complete exhaustion. After Diane woke us up just after 5 am, I realized I wasn't going to sleep anymore. It's terrible when you get out of bed even more exhausted than before you went.
This is not related to running, which has tapered away to very little. (Sleep disturbance can be indicative of overtraining.) It's hard to go out, though.
Posted by Mark at 10:32 AM | TrackBack
February 06, 2006
How we understand what to do
When we're trying to clarify and prioritize requirements for a particular project, it can be tempting to gather expert opinion on the subject and to delegate definition to those readily willing to write up their requirements.
That's the natural way to approach the problem, natural in the sense that water flows downhill. The experts of course have opinions. Often they (at least pretend to) know what they want. Those eager to explain their requirements give us easy targets.
The trouble with this approach is that we end up pandering to experts and to those who know how to state their requirements, rather than those who could benefit the most from our efforts or those who have the most to offer us in exchange.
Posted by Mark at 09:30 PM | TrackBack
February 04, 2006
Should give in to check up, part V
This morning at 7:15 I was at the cardiologist's office. His assistant attached some leads to my legs, arms, and chest and took what looks like an ECG. The doctor was very busy already before 8 am, but he came back and did an ultrasound and took my blood pressure. He didn't find anything worth noting. "Rien à signaler." He read my blood pressure as 14/8, which he said was okay.
I asked him if I could continue running, and he said no problem. His assistant who gave me the ECG said she was going to run the NY marathon this year. She'd never run a marathon before.
The atmosphere there at the cardiologist's office, which he shares with two colleagues and several assistants, looked fairly stressful. They seem to have a bunch of patients at once. All the patients I saw were guys, though some of us looked in good shape, and others of us looked like we were about to keel over.
The doctor's assistant ended up having me wait a while, then she fitted me with the apparatus I'm wearing now. It puffs up the cuff on my left upper arm every 20 minutes to take my blood pressure all day and night today. More than somewhat inconvenient, but I guess we'll know if my blood pressure is really high or if I'm suffering from white coat effect.
Posted by Mark at 11:03 AM | TrackBack
February 01, 2006
Should give in to check up, part II
Dr. Rantz took my blood pressure and listened to my heart. He got 4 different blood pressure readings, from the high end of normal to even higher than last week. My right arm seemed to give higher readings than my left.
Thankfully there weren't too many folks in his office this morning. I was only a little upset and worried when my turn came rather than simmering with rage.
He wants me to get a blood test, then go see a cardiologist, which he said would take half a day. Nathalie called me at work to ask how it went. When she suggested I call the cardiologist right away, I snapped at her. The paper with the phone number is in the car; I'll call tomorrow. She must suspect I come to work only for social reasons. Admittedly I don't tell her much about what I do (or what I would be doing if it were possible to get some time to work on what I really need to do at work). By the time of night we could talk about that, she and I are both too tired for it. Furthermore, I don't even have the energy to explain my job to my manager, let alone someone whose eyes glaze over when the conversation turns in the direction of software.
At work the anger has been simmering for a long time, though the pressure's higher at this point of the project. Something tells me I'm not even working on the right problem.
Posted by Mark at 02:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 23, 2006
Hypertension
This is the second time a doctor has told me my blood pressure reading was too high. The Wikipedia article on hypertension says:
Diagnosis of hypertension is generally on the basis of a persistently signficantly raised blood pressure. Usually this requires three separate measurements at least one week apart.
That must be why I need to go back and get it measured several times again.
When Rantz first said it was high, I remember him talking about 14 over something. Today it was apparently 15/8, whatever that means, perhaps 150/80 mmHg. I felt oddly exhausted from the moment I got out of bed this morning. Maybe that's related to the measurements, or at least related in that I drank a fair amount of coffee.
Noakes writes, "Blood pressures that are consistently raised above 165/95 mmHg are a definite indication for drug therapy." Then he goes on to say that drugs typically harm your performance.
Statistically, exercise is supposed to help. Diet as well, including losing weight, reducing sodium intake, and reducing fat and cholesterol is also supposed to help.
I wonder about the pressure in the back of my head, which was fixed at one point by the chiropractor. I seem to be tense around the neck again, but I'm not getting the headaches I had before.
Posted by Mark at 10:16 PM | TrackBack
January 19, 2006
Emma reading
After a disappointing day at work, during which I spent a long time demonstrating to myself how little I really know about sizing Directory Server, I came home late. Emma had finished her dessert and was reading a Mimi Cracra book.
Emma was struggling. Mimi says things like "houla," and "glagla." Emma had difficulty recognizing these as words she knew. She's also still working on sounds that letter combinations make in French. But she was persevering, working harder at it than Tim would've done had he not learned to read without trying.
Posted by Mark at 08:35 PM | TrackBack
January 16, 2006
50 milliseconds
Perhaps you already read this from Slashdot.org's feed, but Nature.com is covering findings that show the first impression of a web site is made in as little as 50 milliseconds, about the time it takes to watch one frame of a film.
What's more, these impressions jibe with judgements made after more scrutiny. It appears that we reinforce our hunches mentally to confirm what we already thought. "The tendency to jump to conclusions is far more widespread than we realize," according to researcher Gitte Lindgaard.
Posted by Mark at 09:52 PM | TrackBack
January 04, 2006
BMI
The WikiHow has a How To today on calculating your BMI, Body Mass Index.
While I ate and drank like there was no tomorrow between Christmas and New Year's, my BMI rose from 23.2 to 23.8, which is still in the healthy range apparently. According to the BMI calculations there, I could technically go as low as 71.4 kg (158 lb) and still not be unhealthily thin. Boy, would I ever be hungry, though.
Dana once said every for every unit of weight you lose, you should be able to run 2 seconds faster per unit of distance. Trouble is I cannot recall what the units were. Even if they were kilograms and miles, then dropping to the lowest healthy weight, if I could do that, might result in my being able to run a mile in under 5 minutes. If it were pounds and kilometers, I'd really be flying.
Of course the likely events that would bring me down to a BMI of 20 are grave illness and widespread famine, either of which would no doubt have serious negative impact on my capacity to train.
Posted by Mark at 08:53 PM | TrackBack
December 25, 2005
Video confusion & conversion
Looking into the PlayStation problem further, you may go far afield enough to get to the VideoInterchange.com site where PAL, SECAM, NTSC conversion is explained:
Converting between different numbers of lines and different frequencies of fields/frames in video pictures is not an easy task. Perhaps the most technical challenging conversion to make is the PAL to NTSC. Consider that PAL is 625 lines at 50 fields/sec as opposed to NTSC's that is 525 lines at 60 fields/sec. Aside from the line count being different, it's easy to see that generating 60 fields every second from a format that has only 50 fields might pose some interesting problems. Every second, an additional 10 fields must be generated seemingly from nothing.
Of course there is no reason related to persistence of human vision for PAL to be different from NTSC, for example. 25 or 29.97 fps is already faster than the rate used at the movies.
Engineers in the US worked on NTSC around 1940. They joked that NTSC stood for "Never The Same Color" due to the color subcarrier frequency ending up unstable by design.
Walter Bruch of Telefunken Germany designed PAL, which did not have the same problem. Some folks seem to be able to see flicker since PAL only refreshes 25 times per second, instead of almost 30, but the brain compensates quickly. So I was wrong about the marketing. It's just that Bruch didn't come up with PAL until 1967, at which point the US had probably already built things out based on NTSC.
Later there was also SECAM:
SECAM was not developed for any technical reason of merit (as was PAL) but was mainly invoked as a political statement, as well as to protect the French manufacturers from stiff foreign competition. In that regard, they were highly successful!
(The source for the quotes is the VideoInterchange.com article mentioned above.) How soon will we get out of this mess of old hardware?
Posted by Mark at 11:57 AM | TrackBack
December 19, 2005
Video capture, part XXIV
When I told Fabio about my problem with transcode hanging, he suggested I use ffmpeg.
This wiki entry from Gentoo meant I didn't even have to read the man page.
Wow! ffmpeg takes considerably less time than the way I was doing it before. The resulting MPEG still seems okay. Here's what I did:
$ for file in *.dv > do ffmpeg -i $file -target svcd `basename $file .dv`.mpg > done $ vcdimager -t svcd *.mpg $ cdrecord -v -dao dev=/dev/hdc cuefile=videocd.cue
I am getting some slight wrongness, however, with audio dropouts in addition to a little bit of video noise. I wonder if part of that is taking 8.2 GB of digital video down to 700 MB, or whether it's because the cassette was in the camera for 6 months and got damaged. We haven't been shooting as much video as we used to.
UPDATE: No, it's not the original DV. Must be ffmpeg taking short cuts. It's good to know that if I ever go back and edit all this, the raw content is more perfect than the editor ;-)
BTW, Fabio told me that if I really wanted to do much editing, I should give in and get a Mac.
UPDATE 2: The problem's not apparently in the SVCD, but just in our player downstairs. Looks fine in Totem Movie Player under Ubuntu 5.10.
Posted by Mark at 09:49 PM | TrackBack
December 17, 2005
Intellectual terrorism
Riding back from taking the kids to school, I turned on the radio. France Inter was playing one of those political talk shows where they have one middle aged guy from right of center, one from left. The two have a moderated series of arguments with each other about political faits divers, curious happenings that pass for news because they're easy to discuss in vehement fashion.
The topic of French legislation and teaching history came up. In case you don't know, the French parliament occasionnally finds itself writing laws about what history must be. The exact fait divers I've forgotten, something like the French parliament voting that history teachers must insist upon the positive aspects of French colonization. That may seem strangely totalitarian out of context, like the law about no ostensible religious garments in public institutions.
What caught my ear was one of the guys accusing unspecified historians of terrorisme intellectuel. I wondered how one might define intellectual terrorism. The definition of intellectual is different at least in connotation from intellectuel, but perhaps, "of or relating to the intellect," is safely true for both (source: WordNet), where intellect is, "knowledge and intellectual ability," or, "the capacity for rational thought or inference or discrimination," (source: WordNet).
Wikipedia has a whole list of definitions for terrorism. Sidestepping the question of what a word means when there's so much discussion and disagreement about its very definition, let's choose one that's close, about terrorist offenses, from the European Union since the guy using it is a centrist in a pro-EU political climate:
Terrorist offences can be defined as offences intentionally committed by an individual or a group against one or more countries, their institutions or people, with the aim of intimidating them and seriously altering or destroying the political, economic, or social structures of a country.
According to Wikipedia, the EU didn't manage to define the word terrorism itself. So let me try to patch this one together for intellectual terrorism:
Expressions of rational thought aimed against one or more countries, institutions, or people, with intent to intimidate or seriously alter political, economic, or social structures of a country.
That must not be right. By that definition, laws are intellectual terrorism. I can see why the EU had difficulty coming to agreement.
Posted by Mark at 09:11 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 11, 2005
Fearful symmetries
Some time ago Mom sent a photocopy with pictures of Edgar Allan Poe, Abraham Lincoln, and Vivien Leigh.
Famous photographs of these three had been transformed to show how famous faces are not necessarily symmetric.
Yet as you can see from the gimp'd photos on this page, only part of the asymmetries are due to the faces themselves. A complete explanation of the asymmetric faces accounts for the slight angle from which the photographer shot the view.
I've put together a (large, 1 MB) page showing pictures of the 6 of us here to explain what I mean.
Posted by Mark at 10:53 AM | TrackBack
December 03, 2005
Red wine won't help
BBC News is running an article about new findings that suggest:
While moderate to heavy drinking is probably coronary-protective, any benefit will be overwhelmed by the known harms.... Do not assume there is a window in which the health benefits of alcohol are greater than the harms - there is probably no free lunch.
So maybe the idea that a glass of red wine with a meal is good for you is not true. (One glass a day is probably not particularly bad for you, either.) The article suggests it's more important not to smoke, but instead to get exercise, and to eat a balanced diet.
Posted by Mark at 07:43 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 30, 2005
Bladder control
This morning I went out to clean off the cars. Somebody four-legged has great bladder control. You could see that in the snow. It looked like he'd climbed atop the hood of my car and applied urine with an eyedropper so he wouldn't use too much and wouldn't miss any spots. Then he proceeded to cover another 3-4 square yards of snow along the edge of the yard in the same manner.
Before it snowed and then warmed up enough for the animals to go out during the night I didn't realize that marking one's territory was similar to painting one's living room. For some reason it seemed like a few strategically-placed odors were all it took. Guess that was naively anthropomorphic thinking.
Posted by Mark at 08:47 AM | TrackBack
November 29, 2005
Organic cereal vs. sugar cereal
This morning I sat down to a bowl of organic cereal, made with 12% quinoa. Not sure why Nathalie bought it. This was the second bowl from the box, which was empty at that point. Not only that but also the cereal didn't taste that good. It reminded me of a joke Woody Allen told in Annie Hall about two women eating in a cafeteria or some cheap restaurant:
"The food's terrible here!""Yes, and such small portions!"
Allen's character said that joke's about life. The whole story's also in that organic cereal.
The message is that to get something that's good for you requires extra investment, and it won't be as pleasant as giving in to your childish urge to eat a sugar cereal (now made with whole wheat). You have to suffer more to get something good; you have to work for it. And once you get it, it'll be disappointing.
Since few end up eating the organic cereal, it'll remain a niche for masochists. It's obviously pointless. Just give in. You're not really doing yourself any good anyway in the long run. There Is No Alternative.™
Occasionally we do run into a case where the only choice is one or the other, true or false. Those cases however are not only rare, they are also tightly constrained. Most complex systems have many degrees of freedom. You see this turn up even in systems built strictly with true or false, like computer programs with feature creep, bugs, too many options.
So what about most of our human systems? The organic cereal vs. sugar cereal question remains an oversimplification.
Posted by Mark at 09:29 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
November 28, 2005
Infatuation and NGF proteins
The Register is running an article about scientific findings that love-related brain chemicals dwindle after about a year. It was probably faster than that when you were a teenager.
The researchers found that those starting a relationship experienced increased levels of nerve growth factor (NGF) proteins, which causes sweaty palms and the butterflies...Levels of the NGF protein in the 39 people (out of 58) still in the same new relationship after a year had reduced to base-line levels.
Nerve growth factor proteins? Sounds like something good for you, like something that would make you smarter.
Posted by Mark at 08:42 PM | TrackBack
November 24, 2005
1 fix, 3 to go
A few days ago I listed the weak points identified when riding in the cold. So far I have one semi-fix, which is to wear not only a thin cap under my helmet, but also to wear a stretch fabric tubular garment around my neck and chin. Many cold weather riders suggest balaclavas. I want to keep my mouth uncovered, partly to breathe, partly to keep from having a sopping wet balaclava when I arrive.
I tried long underwear beneath my tights for knees and theoretically for ankles. That was a bad choice. This evening I was late, riding hard with the long underware pinching my knees, leaving my ankles unprotected. It did nothing for the wind, either. At least it didn't bunch up around the crotch.
My gloves, rated to -5 C, just don't do it when the temperature goes down to around freezing. not sure what to do there. Maybe I need mittens.
I may need something for my eyes.
Posted by Mark at 08:17 PM | TrackBack
November 18, 2005
Inside the event horizon
On waking up this morning I was convinced our universe is inside the event horizon of a large black hole. It seemed the edge of the universe was our view of the event horizon, expanding as the black hole collapsed. Compared to time outside, our time had slowed to a crawl. We therefore saw the event horizon as receding quickly.
Time was curiously backwards in another way, however, since the big bang was in fact the flipside of a big crunch at the center of gravity of the black hole, the moment in which matter collapsed to infinite density and therefore could only decrease in density.
Then I started coming to my senses, figuring my mind was playing lazy tricks on me. It couldn't explain expansion in all directions at once without some center of gravity for the black hole. So my dream was wrong. But why was I dreaming about that?
Posted by Mark at 08:38 PM | TrackBack
November 12, 2005
Tough to adjust disc brakes
Putting the new tires on my bike's wheels took about 5-10 minutes. Then another 45 minutes struggling with the back wheel and its disc break. When you close the quick release, depending on the tension, it pulls the frame and brake enough to throw everything out of alignment.
So you have to start out of alignment, but just barely. The skewer has to be slightly off center, too, in a position that is midway between one natural position and another. Once the brake is aligned for a tire spinning with no weight on it, that doesn't mean it'll stay aligned when you sit in the saddle. It's likely to get thrown out of alignment as soon as you put weight on the bike. Very frustrating.
Posted by Mark at 08:38 PM | TrackBack
October 25, 2005
Interpretation
Alan Watts wrote somewhere about interpreting the future from the cracks in tortoise shells. He observed that the wise would in fact gain intuitions about what's coming next from looking at the tortoise shells... by understanding their own reactions to fixed, traditional interpretations.
When PKD created an author who wrote his novel from looking at the yarrow stalks, he seemed to be saying the same thing.
Yesterday the oracle's counsel was perseverance, following rather than leading, K'un / The Receptive. That's the hexagram Faust should've received.
Yesterday I thought I was coming down with a cold. Today I have a slight cold.
Posted by Mark at 03:07 PM | TrackBack
October 22, 2005
Anger management through exercise
During this taper in my training, I haven't been running enough to feel my body's in equilibrium. When I don't get enough exercise, my body chemistry is such that I get angry easily.
I must've been angry from about 1996 when I stopped going to school and started a desk job to at least 2003 when I started running again. You can see it in some of the family videos the kids watch.
The thing is, I need to run on the order of 60+ km (40 mi) per week to start feeling laid back. Overeating can overwhelm my normal body chemistry as well.
Posted by Mark at 08:16 PM | TrackBack
October 10, 2005
Invisible panel icons, etc.
Nathalie called me to say she was having trouble printing. She'd shut everything down before she called, however, so I couldn't do phone support when she called.
Now that I've booted and logged in, I see the icon right there on the panel, complete with a red exclamation point:
When I click that, I get a dialog box:
All I needed to do then was cancel the duplicate print jobs, and resume printing.
But Nathalie says she didn't see the icon. Thinking back to what Carole once said about how her parents used the computer, I realize that there's a big difference between what end users see and what somebody who has played with and built software sees.
Posted by Mark at 08:26 PM | TrackBack
September 25, 2005
Music for running, part II
Still cannot tell how to determine what to listen to in advance. Make a Jazz Noise Here, disc 2, seemed to work pretty well at the end of a long, exhausted run.
At least Frank doesn't say anything meant to sound encouraging. There's a point near and after the wall where encouragement just sounds fake, especially coming from encouragers who are safely immobile at the side of the road. This is not to say I invite discouraging words. I'm just saying I'll hear whatever you throw at me with a sort of distorted social perception, and will only recover my normal sociability after I stop.
Posted by Mark at 07:14 AM | TrackBack
September 15, 2005
Abraham Lincoln and my legs
Abraham Lincoln was reputed to have responded to the silly question, "How long should a man's legs be?" with, "Long enough to reach the ground."
It turns out my right leg isn't quite long enough. Or maybe my left leg's too long.
Yesterday evening the podiatrist showed me my right leg is slightly shorter than my left, which explains the slightly asymmetric wear patterns on my running shoes. He also wondered if I had back problems, which I have had from time to time.
I used to think backaches came from being too fat and out of shape. Then when I lost weight, I thought it was my bed. Maybe a better explanation is mismatched legs.
The podiatrist is pretty sure he can fix the mismatch by adding a bit of extra thickness to the right orthotic insert of my next pair. Must go to the doctor's tomorrow to get the prescription I was supposed to have to go see the podiatrist, so he'll be able to make me the pair of orthotics. (Securité Sociale paperwork requirements)
Posted by Mark at 08:31 PM | TrackBack
August 11, 2005
Methane from Siberia
GuardianUnlimited published a special report about global warming hitting a tipping point, beyond which the process could accelerate significantly.
Some scientists suggest, "The causal effect is human activity." Some suggest that natural processes are causing it. (Whatever it is, maybe we should've had reversible heating/air conditioning installed upstairs instead of just heating ;-)
Posted by Mark at 01:03 PM
July 29, 2005
Jet lag
Jet lag invariably takes me to the psychological low point in the early nighttime of the second day. The worst I've had so far is stumbling through the Bay Area on foot in deep paranoia, a horrible place when you feel fragile. It's hard to believe so many people lived through LSD experiences in that environment when even jet lag nearly sends me hiding under the bed.
Yesterday after failing to get USB storage working, I tried to go to sleep, but could not. I started reading If on a winter's night a traveler, hoping that would help, but it was worse. Calvino was mocking me in every line.
I complained to Phil this morning about the censorship we practice from good manners, keeping our real opinions covered, partly out of the concern we'll be attacked for them, partly because we're too lazy to defend them. We accept nonsense silently, or even with a measure of complicity and consent. The condition is surely exacerbated during job interviews, guest visits, courting. Then we must live with our failure to speak our minds, like the liar who can no longer remember what tales he told.
Phil listened to my blabber and gently agreed, even offering an example of his own to corroborate my findings. Maybe he disagreed, I don't know.
By the time you're old enough to know what's going on, you're already straight jacketed in a context that's breeding it's own problems even before you add yours.
In a dream I met someone who was a mover and shaker. I'd asked, "What do you really want to preserve?" He replied, "Control." I woke out of that one shaking and gasping for breath.
Posted by Mark at 01:12 PM | Comments (2)
July 20, 2005
P & G and Satan
One of the things Dana had decided about the Internet was that the worst misinformation came not from dishonest WWW publishers, but from well-meaning friends and relatives forwarding email of the urban legend variety. A long time ago, he got one about Proctor & Gamble:
PLEASE MAKE A DIFFERENCE
The President of Procter & gamble appeared on the Phil Donahue Show on March 1, 1994. He announced that due to the openness of our society, he was coming out of the closet about his association with the church of Satan. He stated that a large portion of his profits from Procter & Gamble Products goes to support this satanic church. When asked by Donahue if stating this on t.v. would hurt his business, he replied, "THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH CHRISTIANS IN THE UNITED STATES TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE."
Googling to a writeup of this urban legend, in which you can read the full text of the email, I noticed the Google ad on the top left:
Proctor & Gamble Careers
Land your dream job. Search 900,000 job listings. Apply online now.
I guess if you're going to hell anyway, you'd better get a head start up the career ladder.
Posted by Mark at 03:09 AM
June 30, 2005
Love or confusion
This morning I woke up at 4:12 am with cramps in my left foot and the realization that God does not necessarily hate us. It seems possible that an omnipotent, omniscient creator could both love us and not take us out of the current situation. Metaphorically, God as Our Father stands beside his tormented children realizing that although, even because he loves us he must not lead us out of this box, but instead let us grow our own way out.
I'm not sure we can get out, but at least we're not necessarily doomed. Of course, I could be completely wrong. I'm very tired and my mind has been flaky.
That said, if you consider yourself an atheist and yet read this far, let me tell you this. Light can be understood as a wave, as a particle, and in many other ways. Concepts whose truth can be proved we call facts, and in this domain we're dealing with metaphors.
Posted by Mark at 06:32 AM
June 29, 2005
Religious
Dad sent around a link to a speech by author Michael Crichton delivered in 2003. Crichton sees the religion of environmental fundamentalism as a key stumbling block in the way of effective, scientific approaches to environmental problems. He also sees "politics" as another key stumbling block.
Rob and Luke laughed at me for enjoying Robert Anton Wilson's book, Quantum Psychology. Rob calls it, "Shit Psychology," in reference to the amount of horseshit you have to shovel through to get to anything substantive in what Robert Anton Wilson writes. Rob also laughed at Critical Path for some of the same reasons, something to do with dolphins. Rob believes in the Scientific Method, so he reads books by Russell and Feynman.
I reacted negatively to Crichton's speech. I don't have well-formulated beliefs about environmental policy, perhaps because I shy away from contact with the world outside ideas, instead remaining in a cool, dark corner of that cave, replaying the same slides with the old branding. I hate the Scientific Method, although I cannot imagine anything better. The hate seems totally irrational.
Rage comes out of a feeling I've had my entire life, a feeling of powerlessness and of being trapped in the same sense as the narrator of Kafka's Bericht für eine Akademie, yet with the eldest child and idealist stress of both infinitely high expectations -- there are only failures -- and the pressing need to do something about it. That rage drives my extremism and my revulsion. Sometimes it also drives reserve and compassion, since most other people must also be islands of horrible suffering.
When I look at the situation from outside, it's positively hilarious. Psychological slapstick.
At another level, it's another interesting engineering problem. That makes at least two:
- What fits better than rule of law?
- How do we think straight?
Mark Williams observed years ago in Vaihingen when he was studying at Stuttgart and I was farting around that engineering looks out at the world to solve problems in the hope of finding a better fit, and that the Buddhists decided instead to look within and solve problems in the expectation that if you get yourself straightened out, the world will follow.
It occurs to me here on the floor of my cave that in wondering which to do, I'm doing neither.
Posted by Mark at 06:20 AM
June 26, 2005
Revisiting the rule of law
Geoff Arnold blogged in consternation about those of us who run red lights and stop signs when cycling. The comments ranged from, "We have laws about this and these folks should follow them," to, "Why in the world should I allow this law to dicate my behavior in situations to which it very obviously does not apply?" All of that can be debated, and was, in the context of cycling within or outside of the rules of the road.
Rob and I had an equivalent discussion at work the other day about standards and conformance in software, with the specific context being management frameworks. Agreements always seem to break on the equivalent of cyclists running red lights. The thing is, most of the cyclists doing that agree in principle with the laws they're breaking. Had they taken part in establishing the law, they'd probably have come to the same conclusions as the representatives who voted on the text.
In places outside the US, like France where I live, there's a fatalistic acceptance of the gulf between theory and reality. As a result when French officials came up with a plan to reduce the number of traffic accidents on French roads, they decided simply to more strictly enforce existing laws and begin a huge scare campaign. The results were dramatic reductions in the number of people dying and getting injured on the roads. So you can more effectively force application of the theory...
...but when there's an alternative, people will opt out. Even in areas of high population density, we've managed to make commuting with the car almost inevitable. A crackdown therefore breaks people, forcing them to behave according to the law. It won't work as well in situations of choice. Yet that's exactly where we want to arrive at protocols, agreements on how we'll operate, that must be respected voluntarily.
Jon Bosak may say we can get to such agreements following Robert's rules of order. What we do, however, is come up with rule of law plus bodies of legislation. Then we find situations where specific legal prescriptions do not apply, and otherwise upstanding members of the community become temporary outlaws.
Would increased participation be enough? In other words, am I more likely to respect a law I personally had a hand in devising? If you'd answer unequivocally, "Yes," to that question, do you do it when you write software? Or do you tend to want to adapt your design ever so slightly when you're coding?
The rule of law seems to be a good approximation to the right system. Yet it also seems to break in ways that suggest the design is fundamentally flawed.
Posted by Mark at 08:00 AM | Comments (4)
June 15, 2005
Drop out
Wired says Steve Jobs told Stanford grads dropping out was the best thing he could've done.
"Your time is limited so don't let it be wasted living someone else's life," Jobs said to a packed stadium of graduates, alumni and family.
I'm sure Steve says that to all the people who work for him. "Don't waste your life doing what I tell you to do."
Cross this with What You Can't Say from Paul Graham, which Geoff Arnold blogged about Monday.
Nerds are always getting in trouble. They say improper things for the same reason they dress unfashionably and have good ideas: convention has less hold over them.
Paul, that's mythology. Most nerds have accepted the blinders, probably more than people emptying garbage cans. Sure, they get to show up for work at 11:30 am wearing clothes almost studied to say, "Look at this. I'm so outside the box." Most nerds probably also accept a lot of crapola outside their domain of expertise. We're happy when a product we worked on sells, even if it's directly to the military. We watch the news, filters off, sitting there gobbing every drop of that raging torrent of sewage. We buy iPods.
Geoff Arnold quoted Paul Graham, "Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?"
I guess that's a test to see whether you've had a lobotomy. My wife once had me take homeopathic medecine that was supposed to help me let it out. That medecine seemed mainly to make it easier for me to be grouchy. Paul writes:
The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky.
It's true, Noam never got any real work done in linguistics before he flaked off into doing the lecture circuit as a scholarly anarchist. We'd better stay clued in, graduating through the hoops, even if Paul says we shouldn't. Ain't that right, Steve?
Posted by Mark at 09:03 AM | Comments (2)
May 17, 2005
Mont Caume
Thought I could ride up Mont Caume after running. Riding around here is odd, all uphill and downhill.
Got halfway up Mont Caume on a lumpy little road and reached the 2 km marker. Then I saw the summit shrouded in clouds and started feeling cold. It was 8:05 am. So I turned around.
Starting back down turned out to be downright scary with loose brakes and steep roadsides. Had the feeling I'd had years ago when climbing too far up a tree. Then I realized I could walk down with SPD shoes. So I got off the bike and enjoyed the view of Toulon and the Mediterranean.
Posted by Mark at 09:20 PM
May 10, 2005
Headache, part XII
The chiropractor asked me how much milk I drink. He says we lack an enzyme necessary to finish digesting cows' milk in the intestine, and so the liver and potentially other systems have to finish the job. He told me that it can even prevent the body from recovering after training, meaning training becomes less effective. It can also lead to troubles processing other irritants, meaning milk products can be linked to allergies.
So he suggested I consider backing off on milk products while training. I asked him about calcium deficiency. He said not to worry much about that, because the body cannot get the calcium it needs from milk products anyway, due to the difficulties of digesting milk. I'd do better to eat more fish, shellfish, nuts, and fruit. He also suggested I aim to eat carbs that have been processed less, such as brown rice, or whole wheat noodles.
He also looked at the x-rays, and at the prescription for physical therapy. He said it probably wouldn't help me in the long term.
Then he examined my neck and back, finding tight spots. So he performed some manipulations on my spine, which made knuckle cracking noises. Then he examined my neck and back again.
The effect surprised me. I can now turn my head all the way to the left without resistance.
He told me "pas d'efforts" tomorrow. If I feel good Thursday, I can go for a short, gentle run, but nothing hard for 48 hours. I was feeling slightly intoxicated somehow after the visit.
By the time I got home, my head was hurting, however, as were my neck and shoulders. Nathalie says it's normal. Her body always reacts that way after she sees the chiropractor.
Posted by Mark at 09:09 PM
April 28, 2005
Competition
During today's ride, by the way, Matt left me in his dust halfway up the hill in Bernin. As we were rolling through Crolles he said, "Ready for the hill in Bernin?" I didn't realize he was throwing down the gauntlet until my heart rate had gone up 10% and was still climbing.
That's was the only stretch today where we rode hard in fact, but he pushed me to ride harder up that hill than I ever have before. If I want to get as good at riding hard as he is, I have lots of training to do. He may have been paying me back for having pushed past him on the steep part of the hill to Rochasson a couple of months ago.
It was a relief to see the sweat dripping of his brow when he slowed and I caught up. Funny how a little competition can push you further that you'd go on your own. Think I still want to get better at running before I switch to cycling, though.
Posted by Mark at 07:55 PM
April 25, 2005
High standards
In reading Bainton's biography of Martin Luther, I'm impressed by Luther's high standards. He set his sights on Christ as his role model, knowing that he'd never approach Christ's good mind or even his good deeds. Even though he knew he was doomed from the outset, he never lowered his standards because even though he'd never get there, he knew through faith that God's grace would take up the slack.
A reassuring facet of the biography is the regularly repeated episodes during which Luther is wracked with doubt. The doubt makes Luther's unwillingness to compromise his high standards one iota more human. You can almost imagine how hard he was training.
Posted by Mark at 02:51 PM
April 18, 2005
Pushing back the wall
In reading Guide nutritionnel des sports d'endurance I learned that anaerobic metabolism of glycogen is 12 times less efficient than aerobic metabolism.
So any of the time I spent going too fast in the cold rain from kilometer 5 to about 25 was also destroying my reserves at an outrageously high rate. A bit more efficiency might result in a huge boost the last few kms.
Posted by Mark at 01:59 PM
April 15, 2005
Too much water
Both Mom and the DRS list noticed the NYT article saying some runners are drinking way too much to avoid dehydration, and are actually putting themselves into danger of having too much liquid in their systems. People have died from swelling their brain cells with water.
"Drink before you're thirsty" is right. "Guzzle gallons whenever possible" is silly.
Last summer I ran half-marathon distance when it was 34 C (93 F) outside. It took me about 90 minutes, and I did it without drinking. That was stupid:
At 1:01:30, I was feeling pretty thirsty. At 1:15, I was drying out. At the end, I was sweating less than when I ran 10k yesterday, even though today was hotter. Need to figure out how to take some water for runs that long.
That day I should've been drinking something. But that doesn't mean I'm going to go out Sunday and drink a liter of water at every stop. My aim is more along the lines of 20-25 cl every 5 km. That works out to 1.6-2 liters over the marathon distance. If I lose 1 liter/hr, that means I'll be 1 liter down over the whole distance. So if I also drink in the morning, then a glass of something right before going out, then a little bit after the race I should be fine. Even after running hard for over 20 mi, my kidneys were functioning normally by lunchtime.
Posted by Mark at 09:12 PM | Comments (2)
Reading, writing
Emma's learning to read and write now that she's 6 years old. Last night she was reading part of the bedtime story. Tonight she's typing on the other computer: