Re: [FRIAM] Unix Nightmare

[Arlo Barnes]

On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 8:00 PM, Steven A Smith  wrote:

> Prolog dreams involving natural language understanding, and eventually VR
> and mixed reality dreams.  In fact the latter two I would say I still have,
> though they are polluted/mixed with myth-dreams based in various archetypal
> tropes.


I just finished reading *Snow Crash* for the first time and was struck by
Hiro's (well, Lagos') assertion that programming languages are unlike
contemporary natural languages (and for the purposes of the story, like
Sumerian), that they access a more primal part of the brain. I do not think
this is true, but it is an interesting counterfactual reality to explore.

-Arlo James Barnes

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[FRIAM] Document management

[Arlo Barnes]

We have talked a little on this list about related topics, but I figured I
would ask people's opinions outright.

I have about 3 cubic meters of assorted paper documents -- and by assorted
I mean both unsorted into categories, but also of various types.
For example, there are papers that are unimportant that should be set aside
for disposal. There are papers of mild interest that should be kept if
possible (in a digital form, as their physical presence has no value beyond
the contained information, and negative value in space taken up and mental
clutter added). There are documents that should be digitized, but cannot be
disposed of as their physical form is important to their existence
(certificates for instance). Some of the information in the documents is
sensitive, and since it is mixed in, the whole pile should be treated as
such (although there is not nothing that could not be shown to a
well-trusted entity). And the papers are not all of the same size or stock;
some of them are loose, some pamphlets, brochures, or even slim books.

Once they are digitized they will also need to be semanticized and related
to one another to start to make sense of it.
So, how should I go about this? Would mechanisation of some form help? Can
this even reasonably be done by one person?

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and square roots

[Arlo Barnes]

Fine with me. Reminds me of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thripple, and
for some reason marshmallows also (perhaps by way of "ripple"?).
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and square roots

[Arlo Barnes]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 3:07 PM, Nick Thompson 
wrote:

> a sign IS a thrupple .. or whatever that lovely word is

A 3-tuple? I believe "tuple" itself is just a generalisation of "double,
triple, quadruple, quintuple, [...]", with "singleton" being the odd one
(pun? intended) out. So the word you want is "triple".
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Opera (the browser)

[Arlo Barnes]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 4:39 AM, Patrick Dufour 
wrote:

> Vivaldi

I do not think that was the one I was thinking of, but interesting
nonetheless. Looks like it used to be shareware (
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953796), but is now MIT-licensed.
-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] Opera (the browser)

[Arlo Barnes]

I think some former Opera developers also made a free software spinoff, but
the name of it escapes me currently.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Fwd: RE: NASA wants to work with you

[Arlo Barnes]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 3:09 PM, Parks, Raymond  wrote:

> The NSA wants to play
>


> On this site, you can learn all about codes and ciphers, play lots of
> games and activities, and get to know each of us - Crypto Cat®, Decipher
> Dog®, Rosetta Stone®, Slate®, Joules™, T.Top®, CyberTwins™ Cy and Cyndi,
> and, of course, our leader CSS Sam®.
>

Of course, many people know about crypto.cat, but since .dog
is a valid TLD, when will we get decipher.dog (with the
internationalised sister site decypher.dog?

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - Joel on Software

[Arlo Barnes]

Definitely a good potted history up until 2003; much has changed in the
succeeding 13 years (not quite enough, though, as programmers still mess up
their encodings occasionally).
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] ADVISORY: City Will "Flip the Switch" on Gigabit Internet Speeds at 12/14 Special Event

[Arlo Barnes]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 12:30 PM, Tom Johnson  wrote:

> As he said, that space, which now has gigabyte cnx

There is an eightfold difference

between gigabits and gigabytes :)
Thanks for the report-back, it sounds like predominantly good news.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] ADVISORY: City Will "Flip the Switch" on Gigabit Internet Speeds at 12/14 Special Event

[Arlo Barnes]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 11:53 AM, Barry MacKichan <
barry.mackic...@mackichan.com> wrote:

> On 7 Dec 2015, at 11:20, Nick Thompson wrote:
>
>> On Monday, December 14th from 9 until 11 AM Mayor Gonzales will be joined
>> by special industry guests to flip the switch [...]
>>
> Does anybody know how to find their rollout schedule, and a map of the
> “first gigabit district”?
>
Seconded, and did anyone go? I overslept.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] book sale in santa fe, sunday, december 5

[Arlo Barnes]

On Sat, Dec 5, 2015 at 6:26 PM, Gary Schiltz 
wrote:

> Instead of paying to ship them, she had the bindings cut off and had them
> scanned - a lot easier for automatic document feeding systems.
>
If the thought of undoing of the binder's trade upsets you, there are
non-destructive  scanning
 methods

* also .

> Probably not legal, even if you dispose of the originals, but at least it
> would be more justifiable to your own conscience if you have a problem with
> it. Just a thought.
>
As long as you do not copy your scan to share with others, this definitely
would be covered under First Sale Doctrine. Defend your right to truly own
things.
-Arlo James Barnes

*Interestingly, caught this crowdfunding thing at nine hours left.

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Re: [FRIAM] [WedTech] Blog+wiki?oO

[Arlo Barnes]

I think you have a different conception of a wiki than I do. I think of the
collaboration being the root of it, the Wiki Way
: not only many collaborators, but
potentially infinitely many (although quite a bit less than that in
practice).
Whereas it sounds like you would be the only / main editor of your site.

Looks like you want: editability (more 'page' than 'post'), version
control, and 'live' (necessarily WYSIWYG) editing.
Does that sound right? A lot of services offer feature sets *like* this,
not sure if any are an obvious solution. Sites like Squarespace or Wix or
many others come to mind, although they are often not as customisable later.

-Arlo James Barnes

On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 8:11 PM, Gillian Densmore 
wrote:

> Wiki features I like: Can add to a page, if I make a mistake can undue it
> I can be looking at the website and add to it without hopping around from a
> adminy pannel and the page i'm looking at
>

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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: How brand-new words are spreading across America

[Arlo Barnes]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Parks, Raymond  wrote:

> My wife hates "New and Improved" and news-stories about vehicular homicide
> that state "the car hit the group of children at the school bus stop". The
> first has been a staple of language comedy - how can something be new and
> improved at the same time?
>

 Would it help to think of the phrase as a shortening of "renewed, and
improved in the renewal"?


> Her gripe with the second is that a car (or truck or ...) has no volition
> - it must be controlled by someone. The driver hit the group of children
> with the car under their control. This will still be true for autonomous
> vehicles - even if the passengers in the car have no control (unlikely),
> the software developers who program the algorithms of the autonomous
> vehicle will be liable when the car hits the school children - the
> programmers hit the school children.
>

No, that is the opposite of what happened - the car physically contacted
("hit") the children, while the driver was shielded from physically
contacting the children by the shell of the car, or the programmer from the
indirection of the technology.
However, the discussion on how the cause-effect relationship can be parsed
as relates to liability in auto
-related
accidents is a good one, especially amusing is the idea of
software-wrangling using the doctrine of the elemental.

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 10:14 AM, Owen Densmore  wrote:

> If I *was* should be If I were, subjunctive. Loan is a noun so I can not
> "loan you something" .. "lend (verb) you something". Less -> Fewer.  It
> goes on.
>

The was/were thing keeps coming up on alt.usage.english and the English
Stack Exchange - it seems like there is not a strong enough grammar in this
context for English for there to be a hard-and-fast rule either way; trying
to compare English to other languages results in pointless rules like the
'no split infinitives' dogma.
I do not think I have heard people say "I will loan you something", but "I
will lend you something" seems like it would be rarer still (that is the
usage I favour, however). Sometimes I notice people mix up 'lend' and
'rent', oddly enough.

-Arlo James Barnes

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[FRIAM] 'Playing' Versioned Source Repositories

[Arlo Barnes]

So Etherpad  (that collaborative editing web-app that
was closed source, got real popular at one point, closed shop, was cloned
into 'PiratePad', then the original acquired and open-sourced by Apache)
has this feature called 'Timeslider', which allows one to watch the
progression of the document edit-by-edit from inception to the current
state.

Is there a way to do this for Git (for example, through Github) or other
source control softwares? Of course, instead of 'document' it would be
'repository'.

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] a week on just linux...

[Arlo Barnes]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 4:22 PM, Frank Wimberly  wrote:

> Speaking of Windows, a "button" has recently appeared on my Windows 7
> machine which appears to download and install Windows 10.  Any
> recommendations?
>
Recommendations for what? Whether you should push the button? How to get it
to go away? I recommend not having to deal with Microsoft anymore (or at
least as little as possible), but each person makes their own way through
this stuff, more or less.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] a week on just linux...

[Arlo Barnes]

I believe the pair of extensions that are AdBlock / AdBlockPlus are
designed to be cross-browser, and are in the Chrome Web Store. I seem to
get by with just FlashControl (which is immaterial because I do not have
the Flash .so anyway since it is nonfree), but I have also heard good
things about NoScript.
Good luck and have fun on your GNU/Linux box!
-Arlo James Barnes
*PostScript*: Laughed when I saw "not a bash on Windows" - true unless you
got Cygwin working!.

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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: DOH!

[Arlo Barnes]

Another example of something that is unambiguously a game, due to the
competitive and puzzle-like nature it has, and is also (perhaps
unrelatedly) useful, due to the research potential of it, is Foldit
.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] DOH!

[Arlo Barnes]

That is kind of like asking "What am I missing by not attending live music
shows?". Perhaps nothing, if it turns out you would not have liked the
music anyway, but perhaps you would have and it would have given you some
enjoyment. I do not play computer games often enough to want to call myself
a 'gamer', but I have enjoyed some visual novels (a type of more linear
game, arguably), some 'open world'-type games (the opposite, a completely
nonlinear game) like the surreal and disturbing Yume Nikki, and some more
straightforward puzzle games and arcade clones.
It is not some secret mystical human experience, nor does it have to be
some weird pop-culture cult, but just another way to spend some free time.
-Arlo James Barnes

On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 9:27 PM, Marcus Daniels  wrote:

>  What am I missing by not being a gamer?   Seems like it is like doing
> exercises from a textbook  but with higher production values.
>

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Re: [FRIAM] Fun Times in Ecuador

[Arlo Barnes]

On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 6:55 PM, Steve Smith  wrote:

> a bullet (to bite on)


I have heard this expression, but I have always thought that there are much
better choices of things to bite: a second belt, a folded saddlebag strap,
and so on. This website makes some ventures as to the etymology of the
phrase, but comes to no satisfactory conclusion:
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/bite-the-bullet.html

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] The Attack on Truth - The Chronicle of Higher Education

[Arlo Barnes]

Well, if we are using physiological shock
 as an analogy for the life
of the mind
, then
avoiding it would be imperative since it would cause a stiffening, ceasing
effect on activity (and hence, activism).
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Free 32-bit flat-bed scanner

[Arlo Barnes]

I would be interested (sorry to send this on-list, but at least it is FriAm
rather than WedTech :P -- I thought people might be vaguely mollified by
any information in the following link), it looks like there are drivers for
GNU/Linux systems:
http://kludger.blogspot.com/2013/07/using-epson-perfection-1650-scanner-on.html
I can come into town to pick it up.

However, perhaps it would be best to wait; perhaps someone needs it more
than I, since I have a scanner (which is broken but may be simple to fix)
with a higher resolution in one direction (2400dpi vs 1600) and a larger
bed (9" x ~12" rather than 8.5" x 11.7") than the scanner you are offering
(so it would be wasteful to have the Epson [and have to make a similar post
giving it away somewhere later] if I fix my HP), according to these specs

.

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Solar Panels Drain the Sun's Energy, Experts Say | National Report

[Arlo Barnes]

On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 12:45 PM, Steve Smith  wrote:

>  All this just leads me back to the Dyson Sphere
> .  I wonder which faction
> (Conservative, Progressive, Green or Libertarian at the moment) are most
> likely to lead us to that point (ignoring the much higher likelihood that 2
> or 3 of the 4 will likely lead us off a cliff or into a bridge-abutment
> first?
> It seems as if the conservatives would find it most appealing on the face
> of it, perfect and complete harvesting of all resources... sort of a
> solar-system scale plantation (think Niven's Ringworld).
> For similar but different in spirit, perhaps, the progressives would
> approve of maximizing the delivery of natural resources to all humans
> equally... greatest good for most in some sense.
> Greens, you would think, would be totally opposed, the epitome of
> destroying the "natural order".
> LIbertarians probably assume that this is where we will end up on our own,
> totally optimizing resource utilization through uber-free markets?
>

Assuming the original formulation of the Dyson sphere as a network of
independent statites, I think the greens would be on board more than you
expect. For any conceivable energy usage for the near future, we would
nowhere near as many statites as it would take to significantly reduce the
amount of solar energy that gets past them. Of course, the greens are a lot
less unified than they would probably (need to) be if they were the
dominant party, so there is room for difference of opinion. Are you talking
about a neon green, or more of a kelly or olive?

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] GMO and "the evil you know"

[Arlo Barnes]

Interesting that Apollo and Dionysus are contrasted. What about Bacchus,
the darker and even more mercurial (heh) alter-ego of Dionysus?

-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: It’s Buggy Out There - NYTimes.com

[Arlo Barnes]

Actual insects, which include bugs as a subset, also affect atmospheric
conditions, but are not to be conflated with bacteria, yeast, and other
micro-organisms.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Google's Graveyard

[Arlo Barnes]

The desktop thingy was OK, and Wave looked promising, but really the only
one I cared about was Sidewiki.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Arlo Barnes]

What would really help is websites publishing a file that can be found in
an automated way (perhaps, like robots.txt, it is standardly named at the
root) that defines what areas of the site require what type of login (for
example, it could say that forums.foobricks.ninja requires an OpenID, and
then a browser can, if the user wants it that way, automatically log in
using a preferred OpenID registered with the browser; and if the file says
that demos.foobricks.ninja needs a SceneID , then
the browser can log in with that). This would aid multiple-login schemes,
since the user would not have to deal with the confounding detail of
treating each site like an unrelated login system. As usual, there are
attacks based on this that would have to be defended against.
Part of this file could give the restrictions on the password (of course,
the less the better, for the most part) - perhaps as a regex. But it is
important that it be machine-readable, this will help a password keeper
application to generate better random passwords, and be able to check
whether a user-saved password would be valid as often as it wants, offline.
I think XML would be ideal for such a file, but it could be in any standard
format.

Of course, for sites with poor security, this will *help* rather than
ultimately hinder the attackers, but only because of security through
obscurity.

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Programming Literacy

[Arlo Barnes]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 12:10 PM, Marcus G. Daniels 
wrote:

> Then there's the more direct meaning of literacy, which is whether one
> can rationalize large and complex projects written by other individuals
> or teams.  This is taught poorly, if at all.   Lots of emphasis on how
> to build systems, but less on modeling and deconstruction and
> rebuilding.
>

To pull from another discussion, this happens for the same reason that
positive results in scientific research is (unintentionally, perhaps)
favoured over unbiased results: individual success and competition between
individuals is, despite claims to the contrary, valued higher than group
collaboration.

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Twitter: worth the effort!

[Arlo Barnes]

Why, because it offers you twice-indirected stories? I think that is less
an argument why it is 'worth the effort', and more an argument for why it
allows you not to put in the effort. You could just as easily browse Reddit
and have seen the screencapped comment
,
or you could have even just read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
because although this happened to Adams, he also had his character Arthur
Dent tell it as his own story to his then-girlfriend Fenchurch.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] If you have time to waste

[Arlo Barnes]

Looks like the terminal is not working yet.

dir is not defined
> ReferenceError:
> at eval (eval at  (http://www.windows93.net/c/sys42.js?
> v=1419261125:75:30163), :1:1)
> at eval (native)
> at HTMLTextAreaElement.
> (http://www.windows93.net/c/sys42.js?v=1419261125:75:30163)
> at d (http://www.windows93.net/c/sys42.js?
> v=1419261125:75:21187)
> at HTMLTextAreaElement.f
> (http://www.windows93.net/c/sys42.js?v=1419261125:75:21092)


-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] If you have time to waste

[Arlo Barnes]

Who, pray, is this emulating - Tim Leary?
I do not remember Win95 being so...snowy. Or gravityless.
Also, they usually crop Lenna to be SFW, but not this time.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] GAS

[Arlo Barnes]

For convenience:
Etymonline

 says

> 1650s, from Dutch gas, probably from Greek khaos "empty space" (see
> chaos). The sound of Dutch "g" is roughly equivalent to that of Greek "kh."
> First used by Flemish chemist J.B. van Helmont (1577-1644), probably
> influenced by Paracelsus, who used khaos in an occult sense of "proper
> elements of spirits" or "ultra-rarified water," which was van Helmont's
> definition of gas.
> Modern scientific sense began 1779, with later specialization to
> "combustible mix of vapors" (1794, originally coal gas); "anesthetic"
> (1894, originally nitrous oxide); and "poison gas" (1900). Meaning
> "intestinal vapors" is from 1882. "The success of this artificial word is
> unique" [Weekley]. Slang sense of "empty talk" is from 1847; slang meaning
> "something exciting or excellent" first attested 1953, from earlier hepster
> slang gasser in the same sense (1944). Gas also meant "fun, a joke" in
> Anglo-Irish and was used so by Joyce (1914). As short for gasoline, it is
> American English, first recorded 1905.

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] NetFlix Internet Share: 1/3 down, 10% up!

[Arlo Barnes]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 1:46 PM, Joshua Thorp  wrote:

> The article lays the blame at ACK packets...
>
> “”"These ACK packets are so numerous that they can sometimes interfere
> with downloads.“”"

Not having ever used Netflix, I know almost nothing about it. Why not use
UDP?

More interesting to me is the BitTorrent usage percentages. Absolute
numbers would help ascertain how [a]symmetrical BT is (the supposition
being that people leech more than they seed)...of course, with
peer-to-peer, it would be a little harder to figure out which is the
'server' and which is the 'client'.

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Signature needed: FCC insiders now believe our victory is "nearly" inevitable

[Arlo Barnes]

I do not (yet), sorry. However, it seems there are a few speakers around
the area - I was at the Santa Fe Comic Con 
this past weekend, and there were two separate vendors selling bladed
weapon props (including a bat'leth each), plus Miss Klingon Empire 2014
. It was
quite fearsome.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Linux and WInderz Qs

[Arlo Barnes]

If you are thinking of getting into Linux, you might consider attending a
meeting of the nmglug.org at the Santa Fe Baking Company - it is really
nice to have physical people to vent to and ask for advice, especially
about a good setup (which distro to pick can be confusing. I use Debian and
like it).
If you just need functionality and are not too attached to a particular
interface / program, alternativeto.net is your friend, as is the apt (or
rpm, or ports, or pacman, or...) repository. Seriously, the killer app for
Linux versus Windows is not having to hunt down executables and
dependencies from all over the web.
Some hardware is friendlier with Linux to others, but most works OK -
especially if you are willing to compromise your software freedom :P
h-node.org is supposed to help with this, have not tried it.

Good luck and enjoy!

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Signature needed: FCC insiders now believe our victory is "nearly" inevitable

[Arlo Barnes]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 2:34 PM, Gillian Densmore 
wrote:

> Can someone pretend i'm a klingon or some caveman for a moment and explain
> to me using small words this is still a thing. My guess is it's related to
> money.
>

Klingons are not regulated by the FCC, having their own, separate
government. Or did you want someone to explain it to you in tlhIngan Hol?
As for the caveman, it is a misunderstanding of early hominid culture,
settings, and appearing and needs to die the death as a stereotype
.
However, as a modern citizen (optionally without a preexisting internal
context of history and technical & legal issues) of the United States of
America (or a world citizen affected by the actions of the US
government/citizens/corporations), you may be interested in this
.

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Re: [FRIAM] How to reduce the influence of money in US politics! he7a1agy

[Arlo Barnes]

On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 1:03 PM, Roger Critchlow  wrote:

>  If you squint, you might wonder if the Mayday PAC is all that different
> from the Republican efforts to disenfranchise the poor, they're both
> focused on solving the problem "why is my side not in control?" by removing
> the other side from the game.
>

Well, enfranchisement is a civil right, whereas political bribery is merely
a convenience for businesses and political action committees. I do not
think Mayday will result in an improvement in the political arena (I think
Lessig's invention of Creative Commons was a lot more effective and
positive), but the stated intent seems quite desirable: money and influence
in politics should be as unrelated as our society can make them.

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Samsung Note

[Arlo Barnes]

This thread prompts me to wish that the next big thing in phones/whatever
other tech would be called the Clue™ - think about it, how cool would it be
to hear "Do you have a Clue?" or "For my birthday, I think you should give
me a Clue." or "Ah yes, the later models do tend to need percussive
maintenance; for this one, the ClueBat™ will do perfectly."?
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Fwd: iClarified - Apple News - On-Demand Music Streaming Up 42% Over Last Year, Digital Track Sales Down 13%

[Arlo Barnes]

I use Grooveshark and the streaming functionality of Bandcamp, but I prefer
to download music (from the source or...otherwise) where I can. I find
myself balancing my passion for completionism and archivalism with my low
bandwidth, but a high quality file will always be favoured over a low
quality one -- I hate the idea of information being irreparably (for me)
lost.
My music collection varies as hard drives variously fail and are bought,
either by themselves or in a computer (I have been meaning to read up on
RAIDs and implement one, but have not yet), although probably much of that
data can be recovered - but currently I have a library of 133 files, most
from one catalog .

In the light of this thread, I decided to see what filetypes and bitrates I
have.
Attached is a textfile detailing that.

-Arlo James Barnes
*One month later*
7 'unknown' -- because they are MIDIs, or tracker module files like .nsf and 
.sid - although there is also one .wav there, but it was programmatically 
generated and so maybe is lacking headers?

34 @ 24 kbps -- mp3s, from a single large album of chiptunes. The creator 
claims that low bitrates better match the chiptune sound and ethic.

1 @ 127 kbps -- an mp3 from a single album of very experimental (and to be 
honest, very dissonant) chiptunes; each song in that EP has a weird bitrate, so 
I will list the rest here: 128, 133, 134, 135, 135 again, 138. Other albums 
from that artist are a more normal uniform 128 kbps.

159 @ 128 kbps -- including the aforementioned.

4 @ 160 kbps -- from three separate albums, but all chiptune, so maybe a 
particular tracker exports at this quality?

558 @ 192 kbps -- 192 is 2^6*3 and is by far the most common here. Several 
genres, many albums, I think all mp3.

1 @ 199 kbps -- an mp3 rendering of a .sid, I think.

5 @ 256 kbps -- from 3 chiptune albums by two artists.

1 @ 320 kbps -- a standalone 'liquid dubstep' homage to Beethoven. Also the 
only file I have [mp3] that has metadata reporting beats per minute (140) 
besides two chiptune albums by the same artist, the contents of which are all 
100 bpm.

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Re: [FRIAM] Smart Forums

[Arlo Barnes]

Well, I generally think of the improvement of forum interactions as a
community phenomenon, eased or impeded by the structure of communication
and interaction with the site infrastructure*, rather than as a
computational dilemma *per se*;  but I would be interested to hear what
ways you think fora could be improved by AI.
A general forum for thinking about internet fora (or forums, depending on
your preference) is here .
-Arlo James Barnes

*For software support, it is that interaction with the site is very limited
- mostly, people are only there for the duration of the time they need
assistance, and during that time are more interested in getting help than
giving help. There is no time for the structure, mores, and history of the
site to become clear, and so communication is weakened.

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Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Judge Shoots Down ‘Bitcoin Isn’t Money’ Argument in Silk Road Trial | Threat Level | WIRED

[Arlo Barnes]

It is interesting - I would agree on the principle that anonymity is a
right - similar to the EU's recently introduced 'right to be forgotten',
and the twin brother of free speech (that is, the right *not* to leak
information). Of course, when you are talking about money, people's minds
immediately go to another recently-discussed topic on the list, campaign
finance reform and the related but separate institution of bribery. That is
a pretty good example where transactions should not be private, but that is
because it is concerning a public property - namely, political office. This
does not clear up the issue any, because where the private citizen starts
and their public role begins is unclear, and the question of whether money
is speech is left open. Personally, I view the choice to give money (and to
whom) speech, and the actual gift action...regulate the action.

Anyway, it always seems ridiculous when the government condemns TOR (The
Onion Router) in these hacker/internet/electronic fraud/etc cases because
the Navy invented it for reasons not dissimilar to what you were talking
about, communicating across the borders of politically sensitive regimes.

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Source Forge, inter alia

[Arlo Barnes]

On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 10:33 AM, Marcus G. Daniels 
wrote:

> On Thu, 2014-07-03 at 09:51 -0600, Barry MacKichan wrote:
> > The HeartBleed bug is an example of a serious, unintentional, problem in
> > an open source package. In that case, even though the software was
> > available to millions of eyeballs, not that many actually looked at it.
> > I suspect only the mainstream big programs (such as Apache) are closely
> > examined. Since I usually find the programs I want through word of mouth
> > from people I trust, I don't worry much about it and have not yet
> > regretted it. Also, I use a Mac.
>
My understanding was that OpenSSL is a large utility with quite a lot of
code and complexity, more than needed for the root functionality. It does
not help to have a lot of eyeballs if almost all get bored and confused and
soon give up! Apparently there is an alternative effort underway called
LibreSSL, we shall see how it is received. But it is an interesting
provocation to consider the multifaceted ways something can be (or fail to
be) 'open', or to an even more convoluted degree, 'free'.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] How to reduce the influence of money in US politics!

[Arlo Barnes]

On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 5:36 PM, glen  wrote:
>
> But, again, hyper-focus on how we vote is probably no better than
> hyper-focus on how campaigns are funded.  If only there were some way we
> could compose multiple mechanisms into some magic machine and, oh I don't
> know, run it forward to see how it all works out, then compare that machine
> to data taken from the world and tweak the machine until it seems to work,
> then base our predictions off that machine.  [sigh] Sounds like science
> fiction to me!

 Sound like history to me. Although there are a few things about our
current situation that are unique enough to make it hard to draw
comparisons.

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Telehack

[Arlo Barnes]

I found and signed up for Telehack a few months back, but have not done too
much with it.
FriAM-ers may also enjoy the Super Dimension Fortress ,
which despite the name is less gamelike than Telehack.
Of course, if you want something less expansive, there is always
hackertyper.net (for when you want the appearance of terminal-fu without
having to learn anything) and Jurassic Systems
(for when you know this, because it is a
Unix system).

Why I like CLIs is that, when they are well-designed, they get out of your
way much more than the best GUIs do.

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Re: [FRIAM] Openness amplifies Inequality?

[Arlo Barnes]

Muave - mauve + suave.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Let's level the playing field for SAT prep - odensm...@gmail.com - Gmail

[Arlo Barnes]

For everyone who does *not* have access to Owen's email :) that link is:
https://www.khanacademy.org/sat
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: iClarified - Apple News - How to Disappear Online [Infographic]

[Arlo Barnes]

>
> I think there are too many trails you simply cannot close.
>
Which is why the title is *not* 'How to Disappear Online Completely and
Never Be Found'. :)
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: [IP] Re Read re Losing a Generation of Scientists

[Arlo Barnes]

Perhaps apropos to this thread, perhaps not, is the following piece by Paul
Graham (who you may know as that guy who says inflammatory things and
clarifies them later, or that guy who worked at Yahoo!); the piece itself
covers a larger scope, but part of it seems relevant to 'the role of
mathematics in computer science'.

Revenge of the Nerds  (excerpt):

*Catching Up with Math*

What I mean is that Lisp was first discovered by John McCarthy in 1958, and
popular programming languages are only now catching up with the ideas he
developed then.

Now, how could that be true? Isn't computer technology something that
changes very rapidly? I mean, in 1958, computers were refrigerator-sized
behemoths with the processing power of a wristwatch. How could any
technology that old even be relevant, let alone superior to the latest
developments?

I'll tell you how. It's because Lisp was not really designed to be a
programming language, at least not in the sense we mean today. What we mean
by a programming language is something we use to tell a computer what to
do. McCarthy did eventually intend to develop a programming language in
this sense, but the Lisp that we actually ended up with was based on
something separate that he did as a theoretical
exercise--
an effort to define a more convenient alternative to the Turing Machine. As
McCarthy said later,

Another way to show that Lisp was neater than Turing machines was to write
a universal Lisp function and show that it is briefer and more
comprehensible than the description of a universal Turing machine. This was
the Lisp function
*eval*...,
which computes the value of a Lisp expression Writing *eval* required
inventing a notation representing Lisp functions as Lisp data, and such a
notation was devised for the purposes of the paper with no thought that it
would be used to express Lisp programs in practice.

What happened next was that, some time in late 1958, Steve Russell, one of
McCarthy's grad students, looked at this definition of*eval* and realized
that if he translated it into machine language, the result would be a Lisp
interpreter.

This was a big surprise at the time. Here is what McCarthy said about it
later in an interview:

Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program this*eval*..., and I said to
him, ho, ho, you're confusing theory with practice, this *eval* is intended
for reading, not for computing. But he went ahead and did it. That is, he
compiled the *eval* in my paper into [IBM] 704 machine code, fixing bugs,
and then advertised this as a Lisp interpreter, which it certainly was. So
at that point Lisp had essentially the form that it has today

Suddenly, in a matter of weeks I think, McCarthy found his theoretical
exercise transformed into an actual programming language-- and a more
powerful one than he had intended.

So the short explanation of why this 1950s language is not obsolete is that
it was not technology but math, and math doesn't get stale. The right thing
to compare Lisp to is not 1950s hardware, but, say, the Quicksort
algorithm, which was discovered in 1960 and is still the fastest
general-purpose sort.

There is one other language still surviving from the 1950s, Fortran, and it
represents the opposite approach to language design. Lisp was a piece of
theory that unexpectedly got turned into a programming language. Fortran
was developed intentionally as a programming language, but what we would
now consider a very low-level one.

Fortran I , the language that was
developed in 1956, was a very different animal from present-day Fortran.
Fortran I was pretty much assembly language with math. In some ways it was
less powerful than more recent assembly languages; there were no
subroutines, for example, only branches. Present-day Fortran is now
arguably closer to Lisp than to Fortran I.

Lisp and Fortran were the trunks of two separate evolutionary trees, one
rooted in math and one rooted in machine architecture. These two trees have
been converging ever since. Lisp started out powerful, and over the next
twenty years got fast. So-called mainstream languages started out fast, and
over the next forty years gradually got more powerful, until now the most
advanced of them are fairly close to Lisp. Close, but they are still
missing a few things

*What Made Lisp Different*

When it was first developed, Lisp embodied nine new ideas. Some of these we
now take for granted, others are only seen in more advanced languages, and
two are still unique to Lisp. The nine ideas are, in order of their
adoption by the mainstream, [EDIT: trimmed for length, follow the link for
explication]

   1. Conditionals.

   2. A function type.

   3. Recursion.

   4. Dynamic typing.

   5. Garbage-collection.

   6. Programs composed of expressions.

   7. A symbol type.

   8. A notation f

Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: NTY: Buy Apple gadgets, use Google services, buy media from Amazon

[Arlo Barnes]

1. 2 is easy to ignore and move on from, but one (at least, I do) sincerely
wants 1 to get ahead.

I will reply regarding the UEFI thing later.

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Re: [FRIAM] QRE: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

[Arlo Barnes]

While I certainly would not try making the US (or any Anglophone country)
convert, I kinda like how post-year-20 English looks. A friend of mine made
a conlang called v0tgil ,
which uses some of the same alterations.
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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: NTY: Buy Apple gadgets, use Google services, buy media from Amazon

[Arlo Barnes]

.aspx, so you can see the disdain before clicking ;)

I liked that post, it seemed sincere - but the (extensive) comments provide
more depth. You have people commenting that never use MS, always use MS, or
use a mix. In each of those categories, there are various levels of
animosity or lack thereof towards Microsoft, competitors.

For my part, I am typing this on a 10-year old Dell running XP, and besides
being rather slow, it has worked pretty well - when something starts
behaving weird I kill and restart the process, and it does not seem to
break anything. But support for XP is ending in a couple months, and I do
not have the budget for upgrading - and this computer could not handle a
bulkier system anyway. I do not program enough (read: at all, basically) to
compare something like Python vs .C# or Mono vs .NET, but it is just so
much nicer to learn about how my Linux system (the laptop it was on is
currently dead due to hardware problems; my fault) works and how I can
interface with it (bash is nice).

And contrary to the title of the article, and as many pointed out in the
comments, most of the ire directed towards MS is not past actions
(monopoly-securing), but current things like UEFI deals (which gave me an
annoying several nights a few months back) and the all-or-nothing manner in
which their programs interact; because the community college here bought
institutional Office licenses, their 'introduction to business computing'
class is predominantly an Office course (the rest is Windows Explorer).

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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Tufte on Users (via twitter)

[Arlo Barnes]

I was just reading an
article from
2004 in WIRED magazine about "the Long Tail" - the idea that most of a
market is not the most popular items, but the mass of niche items that
specific people will buy. In conventional brick-and-mortar stores, it is
unlikely any of those niche persons to match a product you carry will find
your store often enough to make it worth the effort of stocking that item,
but online there is more exposure and less upfront cost.
Anyway, the article referred to the pre-Long-Tail market as a "hit economy"
- that is, that hits (as in "that song was a big hit") are what drive
sales, not misses. However, in light of this thread which I had read just
previously to the article, I interpreted it as a 'hit' of a drug, and
wondered what the post-Long-Tail economy would be in this metaphor. A drip?
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames

[Arlo Barnes]

Those work. I think I was thinking of something else, but I will probably
just have to run across it in the wild again to remember.
I was going to say but forgot: C de Baca is one of my favorite local
surnames, because it is the only surname I know that has an abbreviation
baked in (for Cabeza, head; the name translates as 'head of the cow', which
I interpret [perhaps wrongly] as 'head of the herd' - a herder or leader.
And due to the [common across languages] B/V association, sometimes it is
spelled Vaca, hinting at common ancestry with German 'Vieh' and Latin
'pecus'). Another favorite with variant spelling (if only for one
generation) is Haozous/Houser.
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Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames

[Arlo Barnes]

Thank you. I suspected it would be something like this; it seems also this
region picked up a slight excess of Xs from Mexico, which are pronounced
like Js (or like Hs in English), although I must say I am at an unfortunate
loss to call any to memory besides "Me`xico" itself.
EDIT: Well, we do standardize/ise on chile, while others do not...
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Re: [FRIAM] Santa Fe New Mexican: Our View: For mayor, no perfect choice

[Arlo Barnes]

The rationale Dimas gave (in a Generation Next interview) is that he thinks
the public fora Bushe`e and Gonzales have been debating in (the usual
places, that is) are frequented predominantly by insiders, and not the
public at large. Apparently, he thinks the best way to contact the "actual"
public, then, is to flood the city with the physical equivalent of spam -
polycarbonate campaign signs. I cannot vote for mayor because I live
outside city limits (if you actually look at the boundaries, especially on
the south side, they can be pretty ragged), but I would love to see an art
campaign for defacing his (and others') posters - even his supporters could
join in with favorable modifications.

It seems like the main reason behind the (more extensive than one might
think?) feeling of 'no good choice' is that the main venues of discussion
have focussed on politics (like funding) rather than issues and
ideological/action history. Gonzales (Chrome suggested Gonzalez, is that
spelling more common internationally?) may be backed by big money, but more
important are the questions of *whose* big money, and *if* that will affect
his actions as possible mayor, and *in which way*.

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Re: [FRIAM] BitCoin mining by visiting your site!

[Arlo Barnes]

As seems to be a theme with cryptocurrencies, I do not understand the
details, but: some altcoin systems attempt to ensure that dedicated mining
systems do not dominate the 'market', instead favouring CPU/GPU systems
(how they ascertain what produced the hash, no clue). I wonder if they
might be more useful for things like this?
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Re: [FRIAM] FPI > 210

[Arlo Barnes]

Right now I am reading Isaac Asimov's *Foundation* trilogy, which has at
the core of it's plot the premise that a mathematician plotted a host of
social variables out into the far future (a practice he calls
*psychohistory*, predicting the fall of the Galactic Empire and the
consequent 30 millennia of barbarism, and instead arranging matters so that
a pair of organisations will slowly but steadily work over the course of
the fall (~1000 years) such that the chaos would be minimized to a single
additional millennium. Interesting to hear that, although it is on a much
smaller scale both temporally and physically, and probably less reliable,
the central idea has application in reality.
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Re: [FRIAM] Amazon Patents “Anticipatory” Shipping — To Start Sending Stuff Before You’ve Bought It | TechCrunch

[Arlo Barnes]

>
> When at Powell's in Portland, they had a Print and Bind on Demand system,
> I think they were mainly offering works from Project Gutenberg (Copyright
> free, cost of printing only) but maybe some others.   It is an idea that
> would have been powerful 20 years ago... but... I'm afraid with eBooks
> today it may be no more than an eclectic Anachronism.
>

No, that's silly. A certain [large] subset of people nowadays are *always*
 saying how they often prefer physical books because of the feel, the
smell, the weight. Often it is the same people who use ebooks, suggesting
they serve different use cases.
As the digital world encompasses more of our life, it is important we be
able to easily transition back and forth between physical to semantic
objects - in the case of books, that includes not only quickly and
nondestructively digitizing them, but also taking volume printing from the
purview of publishers strictly, to individuals (as has been the case for
small-volume prints).
The Espresso Book Machine  has caused a lot of
discussion, but it is limited by a proprietary library (although if you
want to work at hand-formatting, you can use public domain texts), a high
cost, and low book quality (it is just intended so that university
libraries and such can have copies of out-of-print books, after all).
It is hard to put lots of well-formatted words on lots of well-bound sheets
of paper quickly, a nontrivial problem. However, if individual presses
become the next big thing like 3D printers are now, I think innovation
could find a way. Already high speed scanning is being worked on by
hobbyists: DIY . And it is not like small
presses have not existed for hundreds of years (there is one in the
Eldorado library), they are just not automated.

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Re: [FRIAM] right vs left

[Arlo Barnes]

That is Dewey decimal system, unless you were making a pun that went over
my head. Duodecimal is base 12.
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Re: [FRIAM] Fascism?

[Arlo Barnes]

While a distinction should be drawn between the Federation of Planets
(which has taken over government of Earth, in addition to being the
coalition between Earth and planets like Vulcan) and Starfleet.
The first is pretty lax, and they hint at some sort of utopian society with
ecological restoration, a 'good deeds' economy (since money is a foreign
concept to 23rd century Earthlings, except when it is not), and personal
freedom / self-determination; the second is a military (peacekeeping)
organisation, a navy, and while there is less "rum, sodomy*, and the
lash"than
in contemporary and historical navies, people die around them somewhat
regularly, they violate the Prime Directive whenever they feel enough like
it, and (spoilers) permanently destroy warpspace commons with the Omega
Directive.
Anyway, when I was telling another friend about the fasces thing, we talked
a bit about the Romans' method of economic (and semi-cultural)
assimilation, and he compared it to Starfleet's *modus operandi*, and then
went on to compare Starfleet and the Borg (in some ways I find the Borg
less irritating).

But yes, the 'cog' image is what I was going for; while a sports team or
startup might work towards a common goal, they will also have their own
personal goals for which the collective goal is merely a temporary subset,
and most societies are yet more loosely organised, so that (as was said
earlier in another thread) multiple people with good intentions can cancel
each other out.

-Arlo James Barnes

*Infamously, despite the frequent romantic affairs on the ships (obviating
the usual military strictness), and also despite a longstanding tradition
of fan-fantasies, there has not been (to my knowledge) a same-sex pairing
yet in the canon.

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Re: [FRIAM] Fascism?

[Arlo Barnes]

It seems one has to infer what fascism is from societies that have been
called by someone at some point 'fascist', along with an evaluation of
whether it was an accurate characterisation at the time (which is somewhat
paradoxical).
A friend of mine claims a necessary but not sufficient condition is that
there is a strong corporate involvement in government, like all the
contractors (IBM among them) in WWII.

Also, there is the etymological
metaphor- a fascis / fasces, as used as a symbol by the Roman legions,
was/were an
ax used to chop kindling, with said kindling bound by leather strips around
the handle of the ax for easy transport. My 9th grade history teacher
claimed that in fascism, people are uniformly and completely directed
towards a common societal goal (world domination, economic
prosperity/equality, racial purity in the case of the Nazis, although that
may just be true stereotypically) in the same way that the kindling sticks
are bound to support the handle.
Irrelevantly, fasces are also bundles of connective tissue.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: [sethmessageboard] ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted [1 Attachment]

[Arlo Barnes]

But even the placebo effect is a mechanistic medicine - one is still
delivering the 'package' into the body in order to introduce a chemical
change, the difference being that the mode of transport is an idea (wrapped
around a ball of sugar) rather than a pill. The (somewhat tentative)
explanation for why placebos work requires no supernatural effects to take
place, although I suppose it does not exclude them.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] "rational"

[Arlo Barnes]

We think of art as a special thing, separate from our normal activities in
the world which could make it an attractive candidate for a place where
[weak or strong] rational thinking does not apply...but such a 'true art'
might never be recognized as such. With few exceptions, art is meant to be
shared with others, to inspire some type of feeling, and sometimes/often to
be commercially viable. Art has a technical aspect. For any of these
things, the artist will be using rational thought to achieve the goals
necessary to better the art, regardless of how acutely they are aware of
the rationality. In addition, I think many artists rationally contrive ways
to inspire creativity, by using rational methods of processing with
incongruous (or congruous in a specific unexpected way to inspire a certain
atmosphere) inputs. For example, using
phosphenes
.

Besides physiological inspiration, there is something to be said for the
multifarious nature of life experience, even in a mechanistic world, just
from the statistics of any given combination of events happening to a
person. This can provide seemingly non-rational inspiration to a work,
because we cannot see the input stimuli that is a person's full life, being
limited to our own (although common experiences can give insight; taking
psychedelics might help one better understand psychedelic art, for
instance).

Lastly, the intuition: I tend to think that it is simply a more subtle,
more obfuscated, and less often used logic engine; indeed, it may just be
the name for the part of our logic engines that have not yet been made
transparent to us. Obviously a lot of this speculation could be from
intuition, or just making things up out of whole cloth, but we can look at
cases where people's intuitions are more or less accurate and try to
analyze, using what information was available to the person at the time,
why their intuition arrived at that right/wrong conclusion, and there are
real-life examples where interesting observations have been made about such
(I just cannot think of any).
A favorite anecdote of local Nick Bennett  is an
experiment where one group of people was given a set of points and told to
do the travelling salesman problem on them: find the shortest path that
visits each point once and only once before returning to the start. To
solve this, they would use their visual, mathematical, and logical sense.
Another group was told to find the most *appealing* path that followed the
same rules (a loop through all points only once). Guess which group had the
shorter paths on average? [EDIT: I think
thiswas the
paper, let us see if my remembering has embellished] Was the second
group using intuition? Not having read the paper yet, I am not sure what
the control was.

If I missed the argument, excuse me - I have only been loosely following
this thread.

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] dotcoin mining

[Arlo Barnes]

On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 12:51 PM, Patrick Reilly <
patrick.rei...@ipsociety.net> wrote:

> Hi Owen:
> How many BtC's would you wager on your prediction?
>
longbets.org

On Sunday, December 22, 2013, Owen Densmore wrote:
>
>> Just like other digital replacements (think of Kindle/Ebooks .. nice to
>> read, but hard to share and sell, but update instantly) there are speed
>> bumps not yet resolved.
>>
> This example surprised me because I thought it was going to be about how
technical differences often ensure that two things that are billed as the
same thing often behave as separate tools for separate uses. But the
aspects you mentioned are not inherent to ebooks, because without e-ink
screens and specialised formatting, and also without DRM, ebooks (like
Project Gutenberg or pirated contemporary novels as PDFs) are often *easy* to
share and *hard* to comfortably read, at least without regular breaks for
one's eyes (both compared to paper books, of course).

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] [WedTech] Fwd: A New Programming Book and a Holiday Wish - Google Groups

[Arlo Barnes]

Agree with what Josh has said; it is nice to separate the concepts from
technique (like readability) while also beginning to teach ideas like
giving variables and functions descriptive rather than throwaway names.

Also, I think the process of reëxamining what you have experienced so far
that has been presented as 'programming' is enough to ensure that you will
not confuse the differences between, say, Netlogo and TNG. That is to say,
it may be a problem to remember whether a mental rule for a parenthesis or
the word 'if' or whatever belongs to the model you made in your head when
you learned Lisp versus when you learned Python versus Javascript and so
on, but typing and connecting blocks is different enough so that seeing one
or the other will unavoidably remind you of what it was like to program in
that context (if that makes sense).

The downside to block-like languages is that, because the underlying code
is more complex than your average text language interpreter, sometimes it
glitches or behaves unexpectedly - of course, you get this in typed
language, but it is when you mistyped something or your model of how you
expected something to work turns out to be inaccurate or imprecise.
But then, I am basing a lot of this upon watching other people rather than
my own experience.

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Arlo Barnes]

>
> CryptoCards

Anything like a SecurID?

>From Kevin Mitnick's autobiography
excerptedon Google
Books:
 [image: Inline image 1]
[image: Inline image 2]
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Case study of Massachusetts Tornado: June_1_Sever_Weather_Analysis.pdf

[Arlo Barnes]

This should probably be it's own thread, but since we are on the topic of
weather-ish things I just wanted to note that there was [when I first
drafted this email two weeks ago] an okay (sadly they all seem to be merely
that now) NOVA 
episodeabout
sprites, ELFs, and other high atmosphere discharges, the phenomena
Eldorado/Lamy observer Thomas Ashcraft  told us
about 
onthe
Discuss list one and a half years ago (mentioned
onFriAM
three years ago).
[Commence thread.unHiJack]
-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Langton's ant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Arlo Barnes]

He has a Wikipedia
article, a
Wikiquote  page, and a/an
NNDBpage. The latter says
he started the Swarm development group, which is now
apparently the Center for the Study of Complex Systems (their web design
looks rather similar to that of the Institute, and none of the three
sections of their 'People' page
mention Langton, although they
do mention John Holland). Other pages about
Chris Langtons seem to refer to other people, including an athlete.

Murray Gellmann is alive and presumably well, and I am glad to have met him.

Incidentally, if we are talking about famous people in complexity, the link
and quote (a redux of a redux of a quote from Jonathan Swift about fractal
fleas) that Stephen Guerin posted earlier is a good read; although Lewis
Fry Richardson is not part of the circles we are talking about, having died
in 1953, he appears to have been the one to originate the coastline length
/ fractal dimension thing, while researching whether countries with longer
borders were more likely to be involved in wars with their neighbors.

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] [WedTech] Fwd: Cassini Photo: Stunning New Views of Saturn's Hexagon Storm - News Watch

[Arlo Barnes]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 9:40 AM, Nick Thompson
wrote:

> Could somebody say a bit more about what we are looking at here.  Are we
> looking, as it appears, at a large proportion of the whole disc of Saturn,
> or are we looking at a round photograph of what could be a very small part
> of the whole disc of Saturn?  It must be the latter, right?
>
So we now have a
collectionof
old and new images from Voyager and Cassini (I remember when somebody
told me about Cassini/Huygens circa 2003, I expected great things,
especially from Huygens. Turns out that while pictures from the slushy
surface of Titan are neat, the orbiter yielded better long-term rewards)
and some are better than others.
[image: Inline image 1]
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] [WedTech] Fwd: Cassini Photo: Stunning New Views of Saturn’s Hexagon Storm – News Watch

[Arlo Barnes]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 1:27 PM, Tom Johnson  wrote:

> If these systems move into a dynamic hexagonal mode, might it be possible
> that, if one could drill down into the thing, some fractal relationships
> would appear?
>
Hm. What was your thinking behind that?

When I first heard (a few years ago) that Saturn had a hexagon, the source
suggested it might have a cymatic
cause, which it seems to me is
basically saying the same thing as Eric's
phrasing. I believe it also claimed there were similar less prominent
patterns in the other gas giants, lemme try to find it:

Edit: Okay, so it seems as usual a few people have proposed this idea. I
had forgotten how cymatics had been embraced by the fringe, so some
sources are a little sketchier looking than others - or as one blogger
said, "I discovered that Cymatics aka Tonoscope has a trail of New Age
websites in Google. All claiming eternal life when listening to
vibrations...?! But peculiar it is." (Another blog counters "When it comes
to bizarre phenomena like this, all the explanations sound far-fetched
because the universe is more bizarre than we imagine.")
Several of the sites look familiar; I leave you to do the
search,
but the page that was most likely the one to have introduced me to the
phenomenon was this
one.
No mention of other gas giants, must have been my imagination.

Although the flow becomes non-axisymmetric during the instability, it
> typically remains vertically uniform so that both the polygon and vortices
> extend throughout the whole depth of the system, with coherence along a
> direction parallel to the axis of rotation and no phase tilt with height.

It seems this would change with differently-curved space (as induced by the
gravity of Saturn) and indeed, we see no south-polar
hexagon.

What we really need is a probe more durable than anything we have produced
so far that we can just drop into Saturn/Jupiter/what have you to see what
is *in* there. There is (as always) an appropriate Clarke short story: A
Meeting with Medusa .

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] keyboards and mice

[Arlo Barnes]

My friend has one of those gamer keyboard-and-mouse pairs that attempt to
look sleek and dangerous and that have black plastic with colourfully
glowing sections and names like 'the Viper' or something (actually, I think
the mouse was a Rat). The keyboard is very clicky but apparently very nice
to use once you get used to that. He showed me the macro keys, I guess they
can be set to alter common computer functions or insert chunks of text and
so on. I suppose that could be very useful once you realise a need for it.
Myself, I am content with the cheap laptop keyboard and a cheap optical USB
Logitech.
But Eric Raymond has some things to say about* keyboards including the
Model M: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4975
Also there was a guide to mice originating on 4chan, and when I tried to
find it again I found there was quite a few:
https://www.google.com/search?q=4chan+mouse+guide.

Good luck.
-Arlo

*It was at this point in typing this email that my mouse decided to be
ironic and ignore left clicks. Thankfully I still had the trackpad. And
then it went away after about five minutes.

Edit: sgn...reminded me of a reference I could not find a good link to.

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Re: [FRIAM] Manifesto Project Database

[Arlo Barnes]

A rather hackish proxy, but
ngram
 here.
Datan is interesting (Spanish for "they date [the wreck to 1408]") but
apparently exclusively non-English/[Modern/Pseudo/Late/regular]Latin?
-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] Ever read the Google Agreement you "signed"

[Arlo Barnes]

You retain the rights because you give Google a *non*exclusive license -
see 
thisapropos
thread about the recent update to Reddit's
TOS/EULA . Still does not
mean they cannot potentially eat your lunch, as in
RSR
.
Also, if we are going with unrealism, I claim dibs on Christopher Lee.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Manifesto Project Database

[Arlo Barnes]

A minor motto / rule of thumb I have is: when confronted with two options
without a criterion to arbitrate by (although in this case the name as used
in the Constitution is a pretty good criterion), choose the third option.
It seems other people have this rule too, as shown by the option to the
giff/jiff pronunciation argument of 'zheef'. So I propose *a/an* Ukraine,
seeing that means 'borderland' according to BBC article Robert linked.
Edit: It seems there is agreement that geography and political category
tend to induce articles:
http://shar.es/OqXYU

As for pluralizing datum, most scientists can overlook common variations as
long as you do not say "datas".

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] [WedTech] Fwd: Langton's ant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Arlo Barnes]

Looks like a http://js1k.com/ entry from the source.
James Taylor at SF Prep once described the wick-stretching segment of VAnts
as the ant 'knitting' the wick, and ever since I have been waiting for
someone capable with both computation and knitting to make a fabric-arts
piece. Maybe Bathsheba Grossman? Or a hobbyist. I bet programmatic fiber
arts is going to take off with the advents of controllable
knitting/sewing/et cetera machines.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] UTAustinX: UT.5.01x: Linear Algebra - Foundations to Frontiers | edX

[Arlo Barnes]

I am subscribed to a MOO programmers list, and someone offered a Vagrant
file for MOO tools; so besides eliminating dependency problems it can be
used to giftwrap goodies. However, virtualisation still takes a little
setting up and although performance has improved considerably in recent
times older machines (to address the same ethic as 'offline first', namely
do not design primarily for the most well-prepared users) might balk. A
liveboot image seems a nice alternative.
-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] Why I was wrong about the nuclear option

[Arlo Barnes]

>
> You are bit by bit dragging me out on thin ice here (statistics and
> probability) which is fine, so long as you are prepared to rescue me.
>
> I think, as a matter of practice, that the strength of an inference is
> determined *a priori* when you define your population and select your
> sample size.
>
> Does that sound right?
>
The ice is as thin for me as for you but I would think that the probable
maximum strength of an inference is determined by the nature of the sample
(that can be measured within just the sample). So we can only make very
weak inferences concerning life on other planets, because we have a sample
size of one. But if the first exoplanet we find with life on it has only
hominids, then an inference that 'dominant' lifeforms can only be hominids
would appear to double in strength but might not actually be stronger than
before at all if it turns out just to be luck.
I may revise this opinion upon further rumination, though, as I feel like
my analytical skills are not at their strongest currently.
-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] Why I was wrong about the nuclear option

[Arlo Barnes]

>
> The adjective “weak” seems to relate to how much money you should be
> willing to bet on it.  In this case, with the sample size at one, and the
> population at billions, Peirce would advise you to bet very little if
> anything, until you had a much larger sample.
>
So is strength of an inference something we can only determine *a
posteriori*? Or can we infer it based off previous inferences?

> I agree with you that there are traps for the young lurking in the
> enthusiasm and nostalgia with which the elderly often approach guiding the
> young.  Even worse than “you can do anything you can put your mind to” is
> “all I want is for you to be  happy.”  Both set one up for blaming the
> victim when life screws one over, which it inevitably will.  I do believe
> that “being happy” is a behavior and a skill that comes only to those who
> work at it, but alas, I see no evidence that it comes to everybody who
> works at it.
>
I think probably the only advice which does not make irresponsible
assumptions is "do stuff; try it, you will like it", which is not very
helpful. So any more complex advice is valuable but only if treated
skeptically, in the positive sense of that word, rather than merely taken
to heart.

> No value comes to a child from blaming his or her parents.
>
I would furthermore posit that blame is a valueless activity much akin to
making decisions based on what is moral. It leads to misunderstanding a
system much more often than it aids the thinker, and understanding a
[social, physical, economic] system to some critical degree is vital in
avoiding bad experiences in the future.

New-Clear options? In what context?

Somebody pointed out that society had moved forward because in the recent
debate  not just a few but
many politicians succeeded in not pronouncing it "new-queue-lur".

Do any of you know about grue and green.

I know that when it is light out one is liable to be eaten by a bleen.

-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] BitCoin

[Arlo Barnes]

On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 1:42 PM, Steve Smith  wrote:

> Someone in our FRIAM community (who can claim credit if they wish) once
> suggested to me, based on HashCash 
>  and GeoHash  and 
> GeoCache that
> there should emerge something called "HashCache". The idea in question
> involved a method for being able to anonymously solicit and exchange "cash"
> for "hash" using HashCash methods along with Geo/Hash/Caching. I suppose it
> could also work to have at your disposal your favorite military-grade
> weapons/ammunition anywhere you travel without needing to maintain a
> personal network of unsavory types. I'm not saying it is a good idea, but
> it does seem somewhat inevitable in the progression of the phonetic riff
> (Hash, Cash, and Cache) as well as in the constant arms race between what
> we consider savory and what we do not.
>
 Apparently the name originally proposed for GeoCaching was GPS-Stashing
until someone pointed out law enforcement might not like this. "Excuse me,
citizen, but what are you doing wandering around in the woods?" "Well,
officer, the Internet told me there was a stash somewhere around here..." -
http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/gpsstash/conversations/topics/62

> This solves the problem of the small-time recreational drug user who is
> past their prime and can no longer just crash into any local Dive Bar,
> Starbucks, or Auto Parts store and score some pot "on the fly" while
> traveling.  TSA has made it harder to carry your stash with you, the USPS
> has made it harder to "mail some ahead",  and despite the medical marijuana
> laws, it is probably not equally easy to "score" just anywhere you go at
> the drop of a few big bills.
>
 But there must be some way vendors on the Silk Road deliver their
goods...I figured they contained it in things like ceramic gifts and so on
packaged to foil chemical sensors.

>  - Anonymous ;^)
>
Or at least, pseudonymous...

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Re: [FRIAM] BitCoin Smart Card

[Arlo Barnes]

>
> This device (or others like it?) might make the difference...  A fully
> wireless/electronic/mostly?-secure electronic-debit system?
>
A few months back my friend paid for our high-speed cab ride (to catch my
train...unsuccessfully) with Square. I had heard people talk about it on
the lists (The three sisters? Do we have a better name? Anyway, FriAM,
Discuss, and WedTech) but not seen it in use, and I was impressed with how
*informal *it seemed to make payment.

> If/when KickStarter, IndieGoGo and most auspiciously Amazon accept BitCoin
> as a currency, I think we'll see the bubble inflate some more and the stock
> for these companies (are K and I even publicly traded?) inflate along with
> it.
>
Neither are publicly traded:
IndieGoGo
 & 
Kickstarter
.

> In the theory of "frictionless money", BitCoin might be about to reduce
> the Newtons/Newton ratio significantly.
>
But can one buy Fig Newtons in BTC yet?

> BitCoin seems to be at least open/transparent with the "transaction fees"
> going to the people doing the work to manage the system (self-organized,
> distributed BitCoin Minters) rather than to the arbitrary monopolizers of
> the infrastructure.
>
 I do not think 'miners' (rather than 'minters') is an inappropriate
analogy; at least in principle, a miner of something like gold is someone
who is rewarded for feeding the supply of material by which value is
exchanged, which matches BTC miners more or less accurately.
-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] BitCoin

[Arlo Barnes]

Just heard of Zerocoin, an attempt at anonymization.
-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] [WedTech] Vector programs? and the better os

[Arlo Barnes]

On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 10:57 AM, Gillian Densmore
wrote:

> Greetings fellow technomancers,
> Yes illustrator may have a place in vector graphics. I should like to
> define 'Vector Graphics': as graphics tool set that's bad ass enough for
> text to be extremely smooth and crisp from as small as a postal stamp to as
> big as a truck.
> Personally my quip with illustrator is it's over the top for some stuff.
> (like sending certain younglings a reminder note).
> Has anyone used the others? Xara has claims about being lite on it's feet.
> Corel has roots in drawing.
> For those of you into making a better OS.
> I just ask that whatever else you come up as a feature for it. That a
> feature is not consuming insane amounts of ram, or HD space.
>

 Ah, misread 'Illustrator' as 'Inkscape' and was going to ask you to
specify what problems you had with it. Like Marcus, I too recommend
Inkscape and find  to be fairly light (depending of course on how modern /
laptop- or desktop-like the system you are running is), and although I
certainly am not testing it's boundaries quality-wise it seems professional
vector artists are split between Inkscape and Illustrator (which may be a
workflow thing, Adobe-style versus free/open-style, more than anything
else) so it seems they are mostly happy with it's power. I have heard of
one or two things that AI does that INX does not (but not anything that is
not somewhat obscure); I think it goes the other way too, though, and INX
certainly is a better value based on how much it costs (nothing). There is
a good community for support at
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-user.

I would define vector graphics as mathematically-encoded rather than
bitmap-encoded images. In SVG, VML, and proprietary spinoffs, that usually
means just beziers (cubic and quartic? Unless there is support for
arbitrary degree) and some primitives like line segments (which are just
degenerate beziers anyway) and [portions of] ellipses. Being shapes rather
than sets of points (pixels), they are infinitely scalable, as you say. A
less emphasized but perhaps even more important result is that they are
also more easily semanticized. And as SG says, SVG is a near-universal
browser standard now (one of the only [the only?] image formats that you
can 'view source' on). I have a small hobby of sending random people
well-vectorized versions of their
vexel-like
images, to their (alternately) excitement and consternation.

What kind of application did you need a vector graphics editor for?

Final note: this trick  was useful for
me to quickly see SG's pasted SVG:
(Note: This demonstration will not be helpful to those with text-only email
clients. Sorry.)
[image: Inline image 1]

-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] Manifesto del Macchinismo - Bruno Munari (1938)

[Arlo Barnes]

I stumbled across the Viridian
Manifestolast year,
when the movement was supposed to end (complete it's goal). Of
course, Bruce Sterling had already declared it ended in 2008, but that did
not stop me from finding it a wonderful speech.
-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] [WedTech] BitCoin

[Arlo Barnes]

Ah, like Sealand ,
except that they already use the
SX$
.
I would volunteer my nation , except we already
"use"  the ƺ and the Monetary Unit ᶆ.
However, I wonder if a physical currency can be backed by Bitcoins, just as
most physical currencies today are backed by fiat and used to be backed by
the value of the metal in them (or for paper, metal stored *en masse*
 elsewhere).
-Arlo

On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 10:17 AM, glen e. p. ropella
wrote:

> On 11/21/2013 08:44 AM, cody dooderson wrote:
> > What do you think the first country to adopt bitcoins as it's official
> > currency will be? Has it happened yet? Will that make the value go up?
> I think it'll be one of these:
>http://www.seasteading.org/
> --glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847

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Re: [FRIAM] [WedTech] BitCoin

[Arlo Barnes]

>
> Just listened to an NPR discussion of bitcoin.  Fascinating!  Good for
> bad-guys, and good-guys.
>
 See Comment two paragraphs below.

> The Silk Road market where you can buy all sorts of illegal things.
>
 And some legal things. What amuses me about the Silk Road is the nicknames
of the once and present kings (so to speak) of the site, the Dread Pirates
Robert, being of course a reference to the Princess Bride and anticipating
the capture of one and rise of the other in the tradition of the first, if
that sentence is parsable..

> BC is illusive. Like another "bit", bit torrent, it's so distributed and
> p2p that its hard to get your brain around it.
>
 An undercorrected mistake: Illusive = an illusion. Elusive = it eludes
one. But I agree, and the inherent complexity of the underlying
cryptography makes it hard to talk about in sound-bite format - just in
recent coverage, I have heard so many misconceptions about the computer
science and politics involved with Bitcoin. Hopefully the cryptographers
should be out in force with their diagrams. The best *introduction* to
Bitcoin is a New Yorker article from a couple years ago, let me find it. [
HERE ]
Doubtless not without imprecisions itself, but not so fearmongering.

> Even the Fed Reserve admires it and is interested in its future.
>
 Still wondering what is going to happen to the millions of bitcoin seized
from the first Silk Road. Dump it on the market all at once to drive the
price down? Withhold it forever?

> And in terms of legality, it an offense to steal it and a guy is being
> tried for a ponzi scheme involving BC.
>
 I have heard some of those that tend towards suspicion claim that Bitcoin
*is* a Ponzi scheme. Their theory relies on Satoshi Nakamura owning a lot
of Bitcoins currently. Which brings up the interesting question if we could
guess which interactions are his based on inference.

> And its trading very high against the dollar. Has anyone gotten involved?
> Got a bitcoin?
>
A friend gave me about 3μB⃦ if I remember correctly. I got tired of keeping
the needy blockchain on my computer, so I sent most of those microcoins to
an address with Electrum .

And on the New Mexico GNU/Linux User Group mailing list today (anyone else
subscribed?) someone posted about their project
https://bitcoinpaperwallet.com/.

-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] For the life of me

[Arlo Barnes]

There was a news article recently about a biohacker who inserted a box
apparently the size of a smartphone under the skin of his left arm to
measure temperature and some other metrics. It was pretty cringeworthy.
While in general self-experimenters seem to have a reckless element, most
are more reasonable and have had some neat ideas, like attempting to sense
magnetic fields with sets of near-microscopic beads in the skin. Would not
want to be the beta tester or even an earlier adopter, but it sure does
excite Singularians ("adding" a new sense, that is).
So yeah, a burning-ear notifier for mentions of the notified on the web
would be a good silly project in that vein. Perhaps just glove-warmer coils
in some modded earmuffs.

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] pride and entitlement (was 11 American Nations)

[Arlo Barnes]

I also was happy I spent much of last weekend *not *on my computer, for
once.

> Anyway, I can't accept determined attributes as being something worthy
> of pride.  Enter the "free will" -- for individuals -- and "stigmergy"
> -- for collectives -- debate(s).  What attributes can we really be proud
> of and what do we chalk up as hysteretic?
>
 I do not really know enough about hysteresis to understand this analogy,
but I think this might be a conflation of meanings within the English
language. This kind of confusion happens pretty often, see my notes on
'expect' below. Pride can either mean a claim to competency ("look at this
vase I made, I am proud of it") or general approval associated with
identity ("I am proud of the Aerican Empire / Free & Open Source movements
/ city council although most of the contributions to these efforts were not
by me, because they do good things that I am in some small way a part of").

> Similarly, what can we _expect_ from those around us without seeming
> "spoiled and usurious"?  Even the most John Wayne style individualist
> (self sufficient, yet generous, honorable, naively respectful, etc.)
> will end up disrespecting her environment (people and things) because
> individualism is ... bullsh!t, to put it nicely.

I have only seen a couple of John Wayne movies (sounds like that is
representative though, just kidding) but as I recall his characters 1)
shoot and punch people 2) sometimes just for fun, and 3) have been injured
and relied on help. He does not seem like the epitome of low impact living
to me.

> So, one not only
> should we have expectations, we _must_ in order to fully understand
> symbiosis.

 There are many ways that biological symbiosis is different from social
symbiosis, but I think in both the usual sense of 'expectation' does not
apply ("I expect you'll be leaving on the 12:00 train, then", "You failed
to meet expectations, Bob, we will have to let you go", "Welcome welcome
welcome, to the land of expectations, to the land of expectations, to the
land [...]").
If a clownfish fails to ward off predators and parasites from a sea
anemone, the anemone is not going to say "What the heck man, we had a deal"
and withdraw it's protection, it is just going to continue what it was
doing. Of course, if it dies from parasitism and predation, the clownfish
has one less anemone to hide in. This is why not only biological forms can
evolve, but also ecosystemic patterns. The point is, symbiosis is not
exactly governed by consent, but by mutual opportunism. Each partner takes
what it wants/needs (there is really more of a gradient than a strong
distinction), and can afford to give a little. It is generalised
reciprocity:
An individual or species realises that if there are such-and-such defenses
and offenses *here*, and not *there* in order to save on the cost of
specialisation, then on average they tend to do alright.
So I think rather than having social conventions about how much we should
trust people (or how much we think people should trust us), trust should be
an analytic endeavour: we can use best practices in prediction, such as
they are, to try to guess what a more-or-less safe approach to a given
interaction would be, based off past patterns of activity, theories about
behaviour, and so on.

> (That reminds me of the continuing increase in narcissism
> scores of college students.  Oddly, as civilization progresses,
> entitlement progresses... funny that.)  What should we expect, if not
> lives better, richer, more luxurious, more relaxing, than our parents'?
>
This trend seems unsustainable, as there is no such thing as infinite
luxury, wealth, and relaxation. We should instead set some ulterior goal
(whatever you want, be it development of a field like technology or art, or
observation / replication of the universe) and then remove poverty,
discomfort, and stress where they impede completion of this goal to the
extent needed. I feel it would be much more beneficial to the species and
planet as a whole for someone else to be assured of a source of meals than
for me to have access to more technology. If we can do both, great
(sometimes these things can leapfrog).

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] disorder caused by individual, or collective human agents, in hierarchically-ordered and complex systems--systems composed of sub-systems that, in turn, have their own subsystems, and so o

[Arlo Barnes]

*Old email:*

> What a great cascade here... I'm not sure anyone but you and I are
> properly enjoying it however .

The delete key suffices.  And, in the spirit of "hiding in plain sight", we
> have to populate caches like Arlo's with _something_ to lower the SNR.
>  Personally, I feel successful enough if I can stump ht://Dig <
> http://www.htdig.org/>.  I'm sure Arlo's got a better indexer for his
> cache, though.

 Not sure how to parse this metaphor (I suspect your conclusions are
inaccurate, but I appreciate the vote of confidence).

>  This deserves it's own entire thread... "what means creativity?". And
>> perhaps, "is creativity just another name for emergent?".
>
> Ouch.  No way.  The concept of emergence is largely vapid, I think.  It
> can be unavoidable at times.  But I try hard to avoid it.  Creativity is
> the Twitch, which I think reduces to randomness, a generative wiggle that
> initiates causal flows.  We then perceive novel acts and artifacts through
> hindsight.

I had the same reaction. Firstly, emergence is far less about how the world
is than how you think it should be. Very mechanistically, the 'emergent'
behaviour results from the simple rules, yet it is surprising because we
had wrong preconceptions about what simplicity, complexity and (in a
meta-defined way) emergence are.

> I think the real secret to happiness lies in being able to do the exact
> same thing an infinite number of times, yet thinking something entirely
> different each time you do it, different yet woven/coherent with the rest
> of the possible paths in the swath.
>
 I like this, although I am not sure how it could be verified. I tend to
despise routine, yet if there is a best way to do a given thing (which I
believe) and if you have to do that thing more than once, routine is
inevitable.

> Anyone who has faith in anything should be prescribed high doses of
> psychedelics as a cure for that debilitating illness. 8^)

[EDIT: More or less as Steve said below] I think that psychedelics
themselves do not magically change your worldview, they just provoke your
senses in order to pull you out of your every-day narrow framework or
context of thought (which is survival- and society-oriented, among other
things) so that you may reflect on your existence with a little more
perspective. It seems the result of this is that some people *get* faith in
something (peyote mysticism, for instance) and some lose a faith. Not
having taken any psychedelics myself, though, this is all a guess-based
interpretation of others' accounts.
-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] BS measure

[Arlo Barnes]

"In the language of science often an exaggerated face style has crept. It
also often serves to order the "bush" herumzutexten - in this respect,
there are parallels to the typical PR language."
I am sure we have all thought this at one time or another. It is
disappointing the metrics are not open-source, let alone free.
Somebody on one of the lists last week linked the SnarXiv,
that would probably appropriate fodder for analysis if it was just more
than titles...well, we will have to settle for SciGen. Time
Cubegot
"Your text: 15000 characters, 2340 words. Bullshit Index: 0.12, Your text
shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'-English."
which is pretty suspect :P.
-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] Time needs some sanity!

[Arlo Barnes]

>
> Come the Apocalypse you will probably wish you were a farmer ;)
> Yes, but that is what fuels evolution is it not?  Huge numbers of failures
> and a very very few successes?
>
Well, the US government is a lot more likable during the war. They have a
career retraining program to teach office workers practical skills, as
revealed by a guy interviewed in Taos.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Message from Cambridge

[Arlo Barnes]

>
> nothing you find can be used in court against me.
>
The problem is the same one government has right now: we cannot immediately
know Snowden is not making up any given leak (although we probably have
good reason to think not by now), but most any claim he makes we can FOIA.
It is the knowledge that knowledge exists (and simple things about it) that
is almost as powerful as the knowledge itself; this is the metadata the NSA
(and many technologies we all enjoy) uses. I think the releases helped the
average person reflect on this fact. Also, it lets us know where we stand:
web encryption standards are a lot closer to being broken by sufficiently
determined and supplied parties than we thought. The Onion Router network
is still secure, though the default TOR client software has a hole, and
obviously people's slipups are the most holey (see Silk Road takedown).

> Data mining has its merits, though. The last couple of times I've flown, I
> was waved through security (didn't have to take off my coat or shoes; open
> my laptop) because clearly, the TSA has discovered and examined my
> blameless if eccentric life. A sort of silver lining.

This seems a little bit like 'probabilistically guilty until proven
innocent', though.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Time needs some sanity!

[Arlo Barnes]

>
> Neo-retro luddite that I am, I would like my calender *more*, not less
> registered on solar and lunar cycles.

Meanwhile, I vote to not bother changing our clocks... stay on "standard
> time".  And while we are at it, let's not be too hasty about declaring Pi
> to be equal to 3 just because it is easier to use.

 I have given my recommendation (last clock change) for what we as a world
should do. Rather than rehashing it I shall note that, as a non-farmer (and
someone who does not often keep recommendable sleep schedules, but that is
another story) the conventional calendar, complete with hms timekeeping
system, offers no immediately discernible advantage over an arbitrary
alternative system, apart from compatibility with the rest of the world.
And if that is the goal of the US, they should write their dates in an
order that makes sense (an ISO-approved one,
maybe?),
use a 24-hour clock (of course, that would ruin FriAM's name, it would have
to be Fri<12) and why not fully switch to metric (SI, actually) while they
are at it (besides street signs and odometers [and some speedometers], we
are making progress: SFCC's physics lab has metric floor tiles now).
Also, there is the old joke about an engineer approximating pi to 3 (his
companions are a physicist and a mathematician); it turns
outten places
are enough to measure the circumference of the earth (given the
radius of the earth; let us say you get it in exact earth-radius-units [one
of them, then] for preciseness) to within an inch. So maybe 3 *is* easier
except for edge cases?

> I think I could pass on the flesh eating
> former-family-members-you-have-to-coldly-chop-to-little-pieces-cuz-they-are-undead
> part, but I *am* still drawn (vaguely) by the presumed simplicity of a
> post-apocalyptic world.
>
It's an illusion, I know, but there is still that imagination that a
> primitive, dog-eat-dog (or zombie-eat-human) world would make every moment
> a richer experience with less equivocation... but I think tradeoff is a bad
> one in the bottom line.
>
I am about halfway through World War Z (the
book)
and it is an excellent global, cross-career oral history (and thereby
analysis) of how the world reacts to a combined huge natural disaster and
war. How do they react? Not well.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Message from Moscow

[Arlo Barnes]

I had composed a big email about the quoted statement below, but it was too
wandering for my taste, so the parallel universe FruAM group, and Curl
received that one. The FriAM group and Carl will get a more succinct
response.

> He loves his country, like any real American. This is my impression.
>
In short, there is no 'real American' for the same reason and in the same
sense that there is no 'true
Scotsman'.
Also, a country is a lot of disparate things.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] OSX Memory Management - Apple/Mac FanBois only

[Arlo Barnes]

>
> Except for the very unfortunate codename "Mavericks" it sounds very
> promising...  supposedly the name came from a Surf Beach near Half Moon
> Bay, possibly suggesting "a new wave" in OS...   despite apparently being
> very similar to Mountain Lion, maybe it *does* portend a "new wave".   One
> has to wonder "did they just run out of Big Cat names?" in the same way
> that they are running out of decimal digits (10.9) or does this signify a
> significant change in direction (gearing up for a big change in 11 and
> naming after surf beaches for the next generation?).

Have they done Serval yet? Then again, maybe it is not a big enough cat, or
maybe they want to reserve it for an Apple server OS, or perhaps they
thought it tread too far into Ubuntu's 'animals with funny names' theme
(although they went with 'Salamander' for this month's release, as of
April).
Not being a Mac user, I had not thought about the digits running out.
Unless they are explicitly under a decimal numbering scheme, could they not
do 10.10, 10.11, and so on?
I think Windows had something codenamed Mavericks, because I have an old
CRT with a coat of arms screen-burned into it, bearing the
second-to-most-recent Microsoft logo and the word 'Mavericks', and some
other indecipherable words.
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] disorder caused by individual, or collective human agents, in hierarchically-ordered and complex systems--systems composed of sub-systems that, in turn, have their own subsystems, and so o

[Arlo Barnes]

>
>  I'm reminded of your idea of using Wiki technology (plus some
> conventions) for what you called "Noodles" or "Noodling" some time back.
>
Found 
thisby
searching.
Unfortunately the wiki directory on the sf_x
siteis giving me a 403. Tried Gmane after
the
list archives  were not
helpful; Mailman is powerful but shows it's age.

> If you haven't already filed my e-mail in your "TLDR" (too long, didn't
> read) file but are about to
>
Since I do not delete anything, it is more of a "too long, will read later"
file. I will take your advice about skipping to the end as a more general
suggestion to skim, which I have done.

> Oh... and did anyone (else) notice that the website this came from was
> titled in honor of the unfortunate character "Harry Buttle" in Terry
> Gilliam's movie "Brazil"?  Very appropriate to the topic IMO.
>
Unfortunately, still have not seen Brazil (not to be confused with The Boys
>From Brazil) although I am a fan of Gilliam (and also Pratchett and Jones);
I have seen Time Bandits, which is presumably quite different. Anyway, the
owner of the website is apparently named Archibald "Harry" Tuttle.

> My wife and I are both very "disorderly" people when observed from the
> outside, but my wife's disorganization/disorderliness is highly functional
> (for her, if not those of us who try to function within her milieu).  My
> own disorder/disorganization is more problematic (to me as well as others
> trying to navigate my messes, including these soliloquies on FRIAM.
>
As someone who has been called 'OCPD' often, not unwelcomely so, I have an
interest in the formal characterisation of the psychology and utility
behind human organisation of physical and semantic objects, or lack thereof
- in specific narrow contexts. I think given a good amount of research and
thoughtwork, I could provide a point or two of perspective, if for no other
reason that although everyone has experience with this sort of thing, it is
not something that is often addressed in a technical manner.

> Colloquially, one might simply say "one person's mess is another's
> order"...
>
This is a good example. It seems pretty straightforward and obvious that
this is the case, but I think it has more to do with the schema for
organisation: if the schema is not open, it is hard to discern. It seems
like there could be an objective measure for the inherent-ness of the
schema, that would correlate to how easily it can be inferred by others.
Then this starts to fall into the areas of design in communications (like
you mentioned, web-pages are a good example).

Anyway, I have downloaded the PDF and will read it sometime tonight, I
think.

-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] the answer to several common FRIAM topics:

[Arlo Barnes]

I have submitted several, with no result of course. The whole FriAm list
should think up a good one and send it *en masse*! Or not.
-Arlo James Barnes

On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 6:49 PM, Steve Smith  wrote:

>
>1. Nick's cogitations about "swirlies"
>2. What to do about rising sea levels from global warming
>3. Is there liquid Water on Mars?
>4. Symmetry Breaking ala Stephen Guerin
>
> http://what-if.xkcd.com/
>
> Carry On,'
>  - Steve
>
> 
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Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Nexus 7 review (2013)

[Arlo Barnes]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 7:13 PM, Steve Smith  wrote:

> What you did here entertained me, even though  I don't quite know why.
>
 KYM needs a better article on 'Parodying HashTags'. And speaking of noise
versus signal in online communities,
this is
very noisy.

> "Do they even lift?" sounds like a variant on "Does it Blend?"
>
Almost, but not quite. One vs. the
Other 
-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] Firefox phone

[Arlo Barnes]

[Cleaning up the very last of the old email]

Arlo?  Are you back from summer camp on the ISS or somewhere equally
> amazing?

Oh man, I wish!I was somewhere only marginally less awesome, a Santa Fe
Institute summer camp...in Groton, Massachusetts. Some more details
here
.

I missed his "voice" especially from the perspective of a "Millennial" in
> this NSA falderal.

I think pretty much everyone's reaction would be / has been the same: "Of
course they have been illegally spying on us, that is not news. Still
outrageous, though."
For a commentary on the modern American surveillance society with a link to
teenagerhood, read Cory Doctorow's books *Little
Brother
* and *Homeland * (can be freely
downloaded). I just finished them, and felt they were good reading but not
particularly good fiction.

Doug does or finds an `outsider' (e.g. a clever high school student) to do
>> it.It's all open source and hackable.
>
> Sounds like a job for Arlo!

I think you would probably want an outsider who is more of an insider
(knowledge-wise) to cell and wireless systems than I am. I could tinker,
but you would probably not get a working phone back. :P

-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] Beyond the visible - pushing science forward

[Arlo Barnes]

I have been twice, and the second time I was fortunate enough to be with a
group (my school) who was permitted a tour of the control room and the
correlator (parallel computing) room. There was a hallway with a chalkboard
laying out the operating plan for 1991, and in a corner was scrawled "Jody
was here", although I doubt it was her (she was the actress who played the
main character in *Contact*, a film partially set and shot at the VLA, and
who narrates the Vimeo video [so the description says, I am having
buffering problems]; Anybody who saw *2010: Odyssey Two *also saw the VLA,
in the opening scenes).

Next weekend I am going to the New Mexico SuperComputing Challenge KickOff
in Socorro, which is near the VLA (though the array itself is closer to the
town of Magdalena, a short drive away but certainly not within reasonable
walking or even casual biking distance, and you have to go a bit past
Magdalena even to get to the array; probably the best descriptor of where
it is would properly be "on the San Agustin plains".) so it is a shame it
will be closed. The Y-arrangement of the [large] dishes is impressive even
when seen from outside the gates, though.
It is a couple hours from ABQ depending on conditions, and one more from
Santa Fe, so you would not just spontaneously drop in for a visit, but when
it reopens it is probably worth setting aside a free day to see.

-Arlo

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Re: [FRIAM] Haiku for gChat

[Arlo Barnes]

Dear Internet Community at Large:
If a site carries ads such as "WATCH: Baby In India Spontaneously Catches
Fire", and if said site also has autoplaying video ads that restart a
little while after being paused, it is not a site you should link to. Find
a better site or copy/paste content. Thanks.
Love,
Arlo

*Bash**ō, he cared not
About numbering the verse
*
*Rather, it's beauty
*

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Re: [FRIAM] asymmetric snooping

[Arlo Barnes]

>
> It seems unacceptable that a statement could stand like "X is 52%
> classified" where X is not an aggregate disconnected set of things, but
> some single fact in context.   It would be just muddy guidance.  The fact
> in context can be disclosed to a specific audience, or it cannot.  It can't
> be disclosed 52% of the time.
>
Often, though, there is confusion about what the parameter to be
discretized is. For example, you might use 'facts' as the parameter, and
say something like "52% of the facts about Project X are disclosed in the
press release." Ignoring the point that you have not disclosed what defines
a fact, if you do not specifically say what parameter (I am sure there is a
better word, not coming to mind right now) you are basing a measure on,
there is room for confusion. If you say "Project X is 52% disclosed" a
person could possibly thing that 52% of the times people asked about
Project X, you told them all about it, and the other 48% of the instances
you told them nothing. I posit that any such measure can be made about
anything (which probably boils down to claiming that all discrete values
can be made continuous, which at once feels wrong and is unsurprising)
given enough formal surrounding structure defining the communication, but
that such a qualification renders such a claim almost meaningless.
-Arlo James Barnes

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