Oprah sickens me sometimes– being filthy rich and probably very bored does not give you the right to use television as your hobby, much less think that people care about your personal life. Even if they do. Really– who cares about her having a party? Who wants to see behind-the-scenes? Obviously, I don’t.
Life for me has degenerated into a disconnected jumble of hyperlinks. I can’t seem to find anything to do except jump around from thinking of one thing to another. Actually, I’ve been like this for a long while now– since high school– but now it’s past the point where it only marginally affects my outward performance. Take today for example: I spent way too much time on the computer, which made me late in leaving for school, so I got to school 15 minutes late. In the process of hurrying to leave, I ended up not typing the names of my group members on our paper, which I was editing– that will be like 20 points off knowing how anal the grader can be (I wrote them in). Then I get to school, only to realize that I forgot my wallet; so I’ll be hungry all day– no breakfast, no lunch, and probably no dinner until after 6. Once at school, I suddenly remember I have stuff to copy for work, and the professor of my third class of the day canceled it on account of his being out of town. After my second class, I walk all the way to my third class only to remember I don’t have class today. I walk to the library only to realize: my wallet has all my money, and the copy card in it… Point being, I jump from thought to thought without connecting the dots; there are holes in my continuum, and I think they’re only getting larger; the buffer we all have that stores up information that will be relevant in a few minutes, seems to be shot in me. My father’s family has a history of Parkinson’s, and my maternal uncle is bipolar. Add it all up: I’m screwed.
First, what does it mean to say Animal X eats half its body weight in food daily? How can you claim to measure ‘the weight’ of an animal when it is likely to poop off a third of its weight within 12 hours?
Second, I just want to observe that the world of programming books is a strange one, completely unlike the more traditional and sensible world of academic books, where the authors follow a straightforward plan: do research, summarize research in a book, do more related research, write another book, and so on. Instead, programming books are usually written in one of two ways, with the ocassional rare and treasurable exception: the author has already had years of experience with the topic of the book, and decides to make some easy bucks by dumping core, or the author has no experience with the topic before-hand, yet figures that after doing a little research, they will be qualified to write a book on it.
What makes a person smart? Note the question is, emphatically, not what makes a person a genius, or even what makes a person intelligent. Is there a great difference between the three questions? I think so– for instance, I am intelligent (not so much as I’d like to be) and smart, yet far from being a genius. I don’t see myself as being special… what I have comes naturally to me, and I think must come to many others also. But I have met only one peer at UH who challenges me intellectually, and he transferred. Maybe I sound conceited saying that, but it matters to me. I like being surrounded by people I can learn from, not facts– you can learn facts from anyone– but how to think. In high school, I had one smart friend, and he went away for college. So now I’m all alone, in a world of not-so smart people. Not that I see myself as superior… in fact, I think anyone who cares enough to try earnestly, and isn’t physically incapable of it, can be smart. But most people don’t care hard enough. One of the many wondrous things about smart people is, even if they don’t share your interests, they can understand why you may see excitement in and derive enjoyment from what others regard as dry academics. And they support you in your interests, because they know that it takes such interests to drive the world. That is why I care that I am cut off from other smart people: no one supports me in my interests. I have no one to discuss math or computers with… at least, beyond the level of how to complete a particular exercise or write a program to do something. All the little tidbits of knowledge that I gain every day, every waking moment, that I see as intriguing and profound, remain only with me. The only way I have of disseminating my thoughts to those who might care, might understand, is through this blog.
To be fair, I haven’t been exactly honest. I’m sure there are lots of smart people at UH– I just haven’t met any that travel in my realm yet. UH abounds with political pundits, for example, who might just be smart– viz., actually care about the theories they talk about– but I have no abiding interest in politics. Politics and I are as immiscible as oil and water; understanding the requisite policies and histories require more of an investment of time that I’m willing to make. Not that I don’t find politics interesting… in small, intense bursts. No, what I need is a smart person who is interested in what I’m interested in.
P.S. Maybe smart isn’t the correct word. It makes my kvetch seem a little too conceited. But I can’t think of a more appropriate word. So sue me.
The book I’m reading now, Finding Out About: A Cognitive Perspective on Search Engine Technology and the WWW, is really quite interesting. Included in the book is a CD with source code and the entire book, along with another information retrieval classic textbook, in hypertext format. I’m finding that it’s rather easy going, compared to the other technical books that I’ve been trying to read; plus, the hypertext version has pop-up links with interesting, albeit slightly irrelevant trivia. For instance, on the issue of the difficulty of automated information retrieval from images, the author tossed in this wonderful piece of trivia:
Signature of human culture?! Takeo Kanada of the Carnegie Mellon Vision Laboratory asserts that a very simple predicate can be used to distinguish purely natural scenes from those containing human artifacts: Natural scenes never contain more than a single horizontal line!
and again, he wandered off the beaten path to start talking about cultural evolution and the Monica meme:
MONICA the meme. This phenomenal news event, and the enormous amount of electronic ink spent covering it did produce an interesting data set. M. Best [Best, 2000] has used it to provide some of the first empirical testing of interesting hypotheses concerning cultural change often attributed to Richard Dawkins [Dawkins, 1976]; just as biological evolution sifts through the gene pool to find fit individuals, cultural evolution sifts through available memes (paradigms, theories, hypotheses, ideas, words, and so on) to find the most fit. But theories of biological evolution are notoriously subtle, and the data concerning them are much better! Although it is only a beginning, Best’s statistical analysis of phenomena like the rise and fall of the token MONICA within newspapers and UseNet newsgroups provides some of the first concrete data on some very interesting questions.
I really like this book. Hopefully I’ll finish it, unlike so many others.
Apparently, Socrates read the Bible. Yeah… that’s right: Socrates, the famous long-dead philosopher, apparently read the Bible. Furthermore, he said that if the Bible wasn’t written by God, whoever wrote it should be God. Sound ridiculous? That’s what I thought when I heard it as I was going to the ATM. Three guys were standing around in a amicable circle, one of them pontificating on the Bible, and how people try to “put it down”, and they’re “wrong for that”. The other two guys, who didn’t sound so much like Christian zealots, starting chuckling when he made that idiotic pronouncement. I wonder exactly what type of chuckles those were: chuckles of fascination with the new bit of trivia, or fascination at how uninformed a statement that was. First, Socrates’ time was way before Jesus’. Second, as anyone who has had an high-school education knows, Socrates, along with all the great Greek philosophers, was a pagan! Why would a pagan make such a statement? Furthermore, I’m sure if Socrates were around after the Bible was collated, he would be much more informed about it than to think that one person wrote it, or even to refer to ‘the’ Bible as though there weren’t many different versions. So the question is: did that guy deliberately make that quote up as the coup de grace to his ministerial rant, or did he make an honest mistake? Either way, it reflects badly on him.
And now I’m learning search engine theory, which seems to be based on linear algebra. Strange– lately linear algebra has kept popping up on the radar. First, in my analysis class, the prof gives me a problem that I find suspiciously reminiscent of the definition of a linear transformation; then in my engineering math class, we discussed linear transformations today. Finally, we’ll be talking about linear independence in my numerical methods class tonight. It’s like a conspiracy.
In my Honors Political Science I class, we’ve been thankfully freed from the ties of propaganda that bind all other introductory Pol Sci classes: we don’t have to read a thick, dry text on the internal machinations of the US’s government that explains just why the way the government here is set up is the only way. And our tests aren’t exercises in rote memory– in fact, we don’t have tests. Instead, we read a few classics on political theory then write papers comparing the different authors’ thoughts; so far, we’ve read Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government.
The one thing that I can really remember from either of these books is that both of them develop systems of government that seem, to me, rather ridiculous. The sad thing is, they are based on concepts that seem acceptable, yet the implications of these concepts are far from acceptable, or sometimes even reasonable. For instance, Locke starts out by asserting every individual’s right to protect his life, liberty, and property. He next observes that in the state of nature, no one can be truly in a state of peace, because they live in danger of others arbitrarily seizing their property; this necessitates the formation of government. Naturally, under government, the majority must make the decisions, because if unanimous agreement was required, the process would be too halting. After a couple more (seemingly) logically sound arguments, he reaches a conclusion that basically permits tyranny of the majority. I could point out countless other examples of similarly unsatisfactory properties of Lockian governments, but what would be the point– one bad one is enough. Hobbes similarly concludes that no one has any rights under the ideal government, and the sovereign possesses the unquestionable power of life and death over his citizens.
What makes reading these books so interesting, and yet such a bitter experience, is the fact that every modern government I would care to live under seems to be based on derivatives of the same premises Hobbes and Locke used– natural rights in particular. So it seems they are all equally liable to have unresolvable paradoxes.
And perhaps, all governments do– the thought comes to mind that perhaps theories of government are doomed to inevitable failure by two contradictory needs: the need to protect the individual’s rights, and the need to assure the well-being of the society.
I have set myself the goal of converting the UH NSCS’s chapter website to XML by Thursday. On Wednesday, I have a homework assignment due that is worth 25% of my grade; there are 10 problems, each of which takes at least 20 minutes. I also have to complete a scholarship essay for today. So I have a lot of stuff to do… why am I writing this?
Notes: I just converted my contact-me-through-web-queue output format to XML. You can view a list of all the email I recieve through it at nucoder.l33t.ca/webmail.lst. I can also send you the php code (about 10 lines) if you like– most of the messages are from me to myself, as I surf; the queue idea helps me to store urls and stuff in a manipulable format. My next modification will be to write an xsl sheet to transform it into a nicer format.