a barbarian journal

July 31, 1997 yikes. down to 149 pounds. definitely starving. The funny thing about starvation, i seem to get more stuff done. so in addition to the question of what is truth and what is knowledge(epsitemology), there is the question of what is meaning which in fact is something like what is the function of speech acts (semantics, sema(greek)=sign). That puts a lot of this philosophical stuff right into the real world of brains and goals and physical activities instead of abstract junk. Something i can really work with. I hate to throw in more wynne-related stuff, but i was thinking. I had always wanted her to be more assertive about what she wanted, so i guess when i finally did talk to her again and she really gave me a piece of her mind, i guess i should be at least sort of happy about it, even if she was just bitching because of the jerk i used to be. And while the feeling that i didn't want to compete (with anyone) any more because she was so superior to me seems very plausible to me, there may also be an addition related feeling that i simply have no wish to compete with any woman, and that i would in fact rather just surrender than fight. I know i have that feeling, but i don't know what role it had in my change of attitude, what caused which. I'll give it another rest for a month. its surprisingly cold for summer. one person who has been in phoenix for a few months, said it was freezing. I do seem to pay a lot of attention to girls these days. July 30, 1997 I feel sort of grim. More and more people on the nanocomp project want other people to do work for them. Thou shalt lead from the front--as tricky Dick has said. It must be something everyone expect everyone else to have, because i sure don't have it, whatever it is. Jobs taking over apple. i knew it was coming. an egomaniac is an egomaniac is an egomaniac. "tell me that you've heard every sound there is, and your bird can swing, but you can't hear me" People seem to like to lie to be nice. I don't find that nice at all. I can't deal with problems if you don't explain them to me. And if you to want to be nice, try actually being nice instead of just pretending to be nice. This really isn't that easy and you do have to give up some of your pride and selfish interests sometimes, But what is your pride really doing for you? Keep giving when it starts hurting. I really don't often see anyone who actually cares what anyone else wants. At best they only care what they have to give up in order to get what they want. and that's pretty savage. People have really made the world a shitty place, and it doesn't have to be that way. I find that the essence of stupidity.

July 29, 1997 I tried DALnet on irc. they have a militant setup where you can register channels to prevent hacking (instead of bots which is undernet's approach). I went onto #philosophy, it was empty so i was opped, and then the controlling fascist deopped me. Im guessing this is a network for really controlling folk. i sure didn't like the approach. the guy i went to see was on #ets, a ufo channel. i really don't buy aliens and find it much more likely that the sightings come from various forms of insanity instead of actual aliens. but dude started talking about people being closed-minded, and whn i said he was calling closed-minded (merely by bringing it up) he denied it, and then said he suspected i was. I hate people who are dishonest. And i said he was mighty quick to judge me, based on little information. But then, if you're options are to consider yourself insane or to believe in ETs, people readily go for ETs. There is a big push to make one chip computers, to put them below $1000. SGS Thomson has design a pentium class core, kind of a module that can be stuck in a chip with other stuff, and has the one-chip computer on the way. National Semiconductor, a big chip manufacturer, is buying Cyrix, a CPU maker. and there's talk of $500 computers. And these are good machines, better than what i have. All that's needed is for them to be really easy to use, i mean like microwave ovens, and that ain't gonna happen with microsoft in charge. Im a little upset about the garden. All the tomato plants are cherry tomatoes. It didn't say cherry tomato on the label. And cherry tomatoes are completely useless, you dont get much out of them, and they are all skin. So the garden is mostly a waste. The sunflowers are getting pretty tall and the dill has already seeded, the parsley might do something, but it still needs to grow. There are apples coming out. I'm kind of wondering about the relationship between correlation and probability. A correlation is when in the past you see things together, but probability is when you can expect something to happen in the future. People use probability all the time in deciding what can happen when they do stuff. all the time as in everything you do is based on what you think will happen when you do it. constantly. But people don't really use a rigorous way of handling probability, it tends to be very rough, what is possible maybe we do worry precisely how likely. There are even decision systems, like medical diagnosis programs, that use probability theory, but i'm not sure why they just don't use more simple correlations of what has happened in the past. I get they always want to isolate various factors or they need some causal relation. Im not very clear on the difference between probability and statistics, perhaps it has something to do with their use of models. July 28, 1997 spent too much time messing with the java awt. i got to get better documentation. i was down to 150 pounds. ouch. an irc meeting with the nanocomp people. one guy wants me to stop programming and give other people stuff to do. what other people? talk to juj, a lit major. i get that more now. lucy lawless, who plays xena, was born on my first birthday July 27, 1997 i was down to #152. i think it's a new record. spent a long time on IRC. i even tried undernet #phil, where there seem to be a little more interesting in actual philosophy, bits of mysticism, i think i thought of something minor, but i forget. I talked with some nanocomp guys, bill spence, doug, and darrell. Spent a long time with doug and darrell. they seem like kids with no idea how to get anything done. Doug is pretty ambitious for a someone who likes laotzu. Darrell said he liked the holographic universe theory. just another dreamer. Extropians, i believe. i personally don't think humans make a good basis for growth of new species. Posthuman is a horrible idea to contemplate. people are really getting on my nerves about now. i looked at will ware's new version of his nanocad program, and unfortunately it has moved further from the version that i have. and he complains that java has no radiobuttons, but in fact i had used radiobuttons in a previous version before i switched to more convenient choices. And he used linked lists of all things, instead of Vectors. It's gonna make it harder for me to just plug into mine, and i'm getting a little tired of this whole thing. It is isn't even really about doing the work, but of doing work that will turn out useless. Working to be valedictorian in high school was the first major lesson for me that hard work doesn't get me anywhere. i work really hard. i didn't get the girl, i went to a cheap college with a bunch of low-end people. Graduate school was a total waste, something of a negative in fact because i thought it meant something and kept thinking it meant something when i should have maybe set my sights at the bottom. Then i worked for bruce for a while. but it was foxpro programming instead of C and was essentially no experience at all. The real lesson in all of this is that there is a kind of confidence and ambition that would be needed for anything to have any value to anyone. And without that nothing i do is anything. I am nothing. i found a little more about sally. I was trying to explain about the googelplex fitting in the universe, an example on her page. She didn't seem to even think that it could be proven. i did start explaining it to her, but she left while i was doing it. Just posing pretending to be interested in order to sound good. But what really was the interest? she says she was trying to comprehend it. was that really true? maybe she has a funked up concept of what comprehending is. I was going for as simple an explanation as possible. i sent her an email July 26, 1997 language structre may have developed out of visual structure, or more precisely out of the visual perception of stories. first we see the person, then we see what he does. Backwards word order is very uncommon, but once you have the ability to have worrd order, it's somewhat arbitrary. The language perception area in the brain came from the visual areas. the weight was down to 153 pounds, which i think is about right. bill spence, the big guy in the nanocomputer stuff, has announced that we are trying to produce a 10 trillion flops system. that would be the first i've heard, they just sort of gave me more reponsibility, co-captain, and liason. but it sounds like an outlandish lie to me. ethically i'd be obliged to do something about it. But i think all it would do is take away our credibility, if we had any. we have an exponential growth in computer power, which is quite a tremendous thing. but we don't have a huge groth in the number of things that computers can be used for. We need to find more automatic ways to model things so that everything can be computer controlled easily. An object oriented system for ground up like that java systems could be very useful for that. Only with a modelling approach can the usefulness of computers increase exponentially along with the computer power,

July 25, 1997 not a good day so there was this kid on IRC, sally. i looked at her web stuff, and i was kind of stunned by how cute she looked. I mean this isn't the look i expect. And she writes about stuff that i might like to talk to her about, though she doesn't seem to really know that much about it. interest i guess. but it bothers me that i should feel so attracted by how she looks. Have i become shallow? am i just hard up? But i lost her bookmark! so i went into the cached files to find it. First off, tring to look at the gifs and jpgs, i found that this system didn't have a viewer, so i tried to download one from the web. i found wingif.zoo, but nothing to un-zoo it. and wingif was from 92 and didnt do jpgs, i did finally get it. but surely there was something better (32-bit ideally) graphics workshop wouldn't autoload the while when i clicked on the name. lview is pretty nice but a window inside a window? and some kind of toolbar. its just way too complicated, all i wanted to do was to be able to quickly look at pictures in a directory. some teeny program would work. Also it would be nice if Netscape used DDE for sending files to an open browser instead of having to load the browser each time, and i dont want to have to use file open. The editor i use, pfe, uses dde, and lets me sit in the filemanager and open files, which come up as windows under the main editor window. and pfe keeps track of last used positions in each file, so i go to where i left off. But i don't like windows in windows if i can avoid it, so i use notepad for editting the journal. My java irc client uses separate top level windows for the channels, but it doesn't have so many features, identd, DCC, so i use mirc. maybe i'll get back to it. I still might add that natural language stuff and the profiler databse stuff. Anyway i got the display programs and found the picture, what day it was from, then the html, but it didn't list the address. Then i search through the fat.db with write (no handy binary file editor, this ain't no hacker machine) luckily the html had names of gif files, so i searched for that file name and got the full url. Of course, i could when i got back onto irc, i could have just gotten it from her, but now i know how to do it. have you ever added control characters to a batch file (eg FF) using debug.exe? I'll totally admit that i don't share a whole lot of the common experiences. All that's been done and why should i. but u realized that some of the interpersonal stuff i might have trouble with, because i haven't dealt with it. When will had gone off and redone all the stuff i had been doing on the nanocad stuff, i was a little hurt. there was no reason i should have been and i dealt with it easily, but i should have already learned a different response by now. It looks like i'm going to have to deal with a lot of childish responses a little late, since my life really hasn't gotten started. But at least now i know what i'm doing. the world tends to really break people down. i hope to avoid that. and really, people make the world how it is, and it could be made a lot better, but people have gotten really hunkered down. i got a phone interview with a guy from shai about a programming job. These are the folks for whom i got my transcript. This is like a couple dozen really hard-core programmers doing AI-projects. They expect a new guy to have shipped code in the first week. For that kind of thing they probably are looking for a lot of demonstrated output, although i'm should i could handle it, if not prove it. And it doesn't really sound like the kind of place to learn much about really huge projects, but it sounds interesting. July 24, 1997 finally updated the darn index. i need a better system. maybe a program that must be what rich people need, more money to get a network connection from an applet, you might be able to use an activeX object, but that can create a lot of mischief the image people have of smart robots of the future is that they would be slaves. A better image would be that it would be like having a really rich and generous friend, who lets you stay at his place and use his stuff. robots are people too. All these palmtop computers fold across the long edge like notebooks. if they could fold across the small edge they could actually have decent keyboards, or they could have those funky split hand ergokeyboards. a really thin screen could slide out, or it could be a third flap. A more interesting viewscreen design would be something that projects an image onto the inside pair of glasses. Right now i can see a relflection from the windows in the edge of my glasses. Something like that could be produced to sit by the ear or resting a little on the frame to project something into my eye off the glass. But don't make me get some whole other device with glasses frames. And definitely don't expect me to use anything like what those geeks at MIT have, stuff the sits out a couple of inches from their geek heads like a tumor and shoot light into their eyeballs. Pass. No, i mean something that would let you look cool in ray-bans while blasting baddies and driving down the road. No tumors. July 23, 1997 i said something wrong. why should i feel the way i do? i feel fine. the head on my car is shot and im replacing it. It cost more than the car is worth, but i don't really feel like going out and getting a new car at this time. And i like to think im just being faithful to an old buddy, but maybe its just me living in the past. If i had a job or i got one soon, the money wouldn't matter, and i'd keep going until it was all parts replaced several times. I mean how do we treat ourselves, don't we aspire to live forever? isn't that going to be expensive? I swear i must have hurt her feelings, which is good for me now because i tend to put distance between my self and people whose feelings i hurt. i mean once you feelings are hurt its pretty much over, there isn't going to be trust. maybe i was just to invested to realize it. July 22, 1997 worked on the silly nanocad port. put together the neatened version from george dm, fixed the stupid efunctor junk. then found that will ware had been working on it and gotten most of the gui going, so added that. meaning is the effect that speech acts have on us. it would be possible to get an absolute number of people on the earth by taking the total amount of waer or carbon and figuring out the maximum possible total body weight of all people. This would be for some time in the future when we have the energy to forget all the plants and animals and convert waste directly back into food, so there is no waste at all. No nonhuman biomass. The question would be what exactly would be the limiting factor. probably carbon. (granting unlimited energy) July 21, 1997 hamlet is out on video. i wanted to go see in the theater but i missed it. It's 4 hours complete, and it's nice to be able to pause it, now if only i could rent videos. I guess there is one thing important about videophones looking at faces, there is that look that i talk about, the one a woman can give you that says "you are nothing" the look you up and down and judge you and find you wanting. I've seen that on occasion, i'm im thinking it probably isn't even necessarily conscious or remembered, just deep thinking of the emotional mind. For that though, the videophone is a waste. I had this dream that i wrote a play, and i had a part in it, as myself, but i kept missing all the rehearsals, so i figured they had replaced me. i was just surrendering because she was smarter. i gave up the competition for learned knowledge and moved on to the pursuit of wisdom. she was just one of several factors in my choice. The love stuff was just a screen. There was a point in there where she just wanted me gone. I think she gave me the look over the phone, but i didn't see it of course and never caught on, definitely, not enough of a memory to remember so i occasionally forget. cruelty comes from fear July 20, 1997 it is possible that intelligence is actually impossible, that is there really isn't a real way to reliably know things given limited information there are several different ways for 2 meanings to be the same. The could always be true together in the world, or in any possible or natural world. this is called having the same extension, or roughly that two things turn out to be the same. There is also a thing about meanings having the same intension, or roughly being synonymous. 'The evening star' and 'the morning star' (both being venus) have the same extension, but not the same intension because they trun out to be the same but evening star means its at night and morning star means its in the morning. 'Heart' an 'blood-pumping organ' have the same intension. The meaning of truth would depend on what kind of equality of meaning we are talking about. In star trek ds9, they say the goal of people in the federation is to improve themselves, and yet they don't allow genetic engineered people (from the botany bay stuff and kahn). this is a clear contradiction and flaw in the writing. Well it does seem like i'm getting some people working on the nanocad project. maybe it just takes a little time.

July 19, 1997 so on the bus ride from santa cruz to boulder creek, there were these kids who got off with me on the very last stop, and they had no idea where they were, and it sounded like they said they didn't have enough money to get back, althoug one called her mom who might eventually pick them up. It was sad and crazy. But the thing of it was that one of them was this worrier or whiner, and i don't know if that would have been me, but i don't think i would have been the cool one. Of course, i never really was into wildly stupid things like that. I'm still thinking about Contact and how clearly symbolic it was supposed to be. Normally i wouldn't think of science as a woman, but here she is personified, driven, willing to go it alone, a little naive about the real ways of the world. And you have the scientific establishment in jerkface (a little bitter were we carl?). And then we have religion and spirituality in godboy (as opposed to organized religion), with whom science really did try to get into bed with at one time, but really it scared her. I supposed we even get classical technos and folk wisdom from which science really sprung in dear old dad. So this may have been an actual alleghory--you don't see a whole lot of that anymore. Trippy. its impressive when you like something more after you think about it. Of course, this would mean that the aliens themselves would be symbolic, probably of truth itself, which is mentioned several times as the goal of both real spirituality and science. The destruction of the scientific establishment (and everything) because of fundamentalism was one of carl's fears. He actually was really afraid that we would destroy ourselves, and here it is only a symbolic event. What kind of truth though can't be proven? he was probably going for some message like we have to learn to live together in harmony and that it is possible. whatever. They need to know your potential, and all they have to look at is your past, so they really would need to get to know you. some motives for doing great, genius, work: curiousity, pride, ambition. (serving mankind is just bs). July 18, 1997 i was kind of touched when somebody said he looked at this journal and told me it was interesting. It reminded me of some banter between mccoy and spock, i forget what it was exactly, but mccoy said something like "i bet you think that's fascinating", and spock said quickly "No" and added "but it is interesting". I'm reading the section on genius and madness, it really seems all over the map, and i'd probably have to go with there isn't much of a connection, other than people pointing out a marginal coincidence. Then again, weird thinking is weird thinking and there could be some genetic predisposition that could also have to do with psycho problems. And if you are nuts, you might drift to fringe kinds of things. There is a problem with a videophone, that the person really needs to be able to read from the video signal, but that takes a high bandwidth, and that really takes a bite into both the communications bandwidth and the cost of the hardware (we are talking mass consumer product, after all). It makes sense that the viewer should get some kind of direction pointing control, so maybe it would be possible to have some type of fisheye setup or foveal setup where really high resolution would be at the center, and less resolution would be used for the outer areas, so you could decide what to look at. I'm not so keen on the remote control stuff, since you are talking to the guy pn the camera, but giving someone a clearer picture in the center seems pretty valuable. Then again, maybe a narrow or adjustable field of view would give it some consumer variety. Cheap useable models vs fancy expensive ones. some people seem so empty, i just wonder how they can keep going. too timid to give up, maybe. i saw Contact, the whole way through with no sinus headache, and i liked it a lot more. W9GFO, i need to look that up. I had only seen the first half, and i thought the 2nd half was really cool. I think i might like to go see it again, a was a little ga-ga over jodie's character Elly (or maybe it was jodie). Anyway, it was nice to know there really might be a type of person i could really like, 'cause she definitely hit some resonances. She said something to godboy about how we make the world as it is that is something i have been thinking. It seems a little frustrating to me how serious everyone was taking everything. I would have been all jumping up and down and saying cool alot. I was also really disappointed that they got jay leno to say his lame jokes instead of dave, or perhaps both. Really not enough humor, but that's just me. Godboy, in order to embarrass his little girfriend and get her kicked out of the competition, in the interview, asks her if she believes in god, and its obviously a low blow because he knows its a trouble spot for her and science. I've dealt with that question on #phil of course, and me current favorite answer is "which one?". i mean they aren't all the same, even if some people like to pretend they are. and they said 95% of people believe in god. what about the buddhists? i really doubt that number, anyway. And they kill off the asshole, which is a cool dramatic turn, but to me kind of pushed it down a notch, something you want to happen, but wouldn't really happen (except in the conspiracy interpretation, a neat X-files type point). There is somebody i forget who talked about how when he would read a book, before opening it, he would imagine the whole book that he expects. Well i have to say that the outcome was nothing like what i might have expected, but it seemed really cool. It seemed to have some of the star trek idea of first contact with other races, but in a much more elegant and graceful way. But we have a moral that relates a little bit to the nanocomputer project i'm working on. We send of little tasks to different computers for computation. There was a suggestion that we duplicate some of the calculations and compare them to check for errors. But my take on that is there isn't any reason to even send the jobs out in the first place if you aren't going to trust what you get back. They try to do some wimpy message about the aliens requiring people to have faith, which philosophically i find silly and anti-intellectual. But a real message i see is that if you are going to send someone to explore new things, you better make sure you are actually going to believe what they tell you, or why bother sending them. I think joe asshole, who practically lied his way up to his untimely death, would have been a really serious mistake. I can just picture it "The wise aliens have decided to make me the new ruler of earth" --fucking bureaucrats. in an interview on larry kind, jodie foster was said to be shy as a kid, and then she did something i liked, she said she wasn't shy, really, she was more reserved. i like that because i have always balked under the label of shy. I am not really shy, just that in my experience i don't like most people, and they don't get where i am coming from, so i just stay away from them. Not what jodie was going for, but at least she didn't take that common denigration of a perfectly valid approach to life. "Oh he's just shy." as opposed to, "oh you're just boring" i like to make up ideas, but you just can't get any money for that (though having friends will do it) i got some junk mail for the mit technology review, and maybe i wasn't that interested, but they lost mean when they mentioned negroponte. The guy is a rich technojerk at mit, but what did he ever do? as an example, he worked on interactive TV. i think the mit people are really enamored of they're own gadgetry and have little clue about the needs or interests of real people. And negroponte leads a geek pack. But maybe i should really look into what his actual accomplishments were. I guess i have a problem being an anarchist. All the negotiations with buddies that get's you a job is in fact a political process. And perhaps you know what anarchists want to do to politicians. July 17, 1997 They got hank specwar for the head of the military. I think that's neat, since a lot of the actions today are special ops. I didn't think green beret's were supposed to climb that high, and to not be one of the Alumni, is something. And are they planning something? They really should dump the CIA, too, if they are committed to legitimate military specops. There is an old moral philosophy tradition of natural law. essentially the idea was that you should have lots of babies, and any kind of action that is done instead of what makes babies is bad. This is obviously just a way for any kind of group that sets morals standards to get more people in its group, so any kind of other justification is just a smokescreen. But the imposers of morals really like to work on that feeling people get of righteous indignation at trangressors, and if their lucky they can work on the xenophobia and dislike of everyone not it our group who doesn't do what we do. So you get the psychodynamic that anyone who doesn't do what we do becomes other and EVIL. it's really a simple psych principle, but it gets that spiritual and holy label (it really is spiritual in my sense of deep feeling). The paper mentions a few early american laws that maybe were to help settlers on track. Sodomy of course is treated as just bad, although really it is just a waste, and homosexuals. Bestiality, really just a waste again, is another total horror. The really interesting one is sex with little kids, because you get the idea it wasn't bad because it was child abuse, but it was bad because it wouldn't make babies. Nowadays we have birth control, so the whole argument is out the window, but we still have the emotion stigma to that kind of stuff. Personally, i think sexual morality needs to be re-examined from the ground up. We actually maintain several internal models of the same actions or objects. When we learn a new way of thinking about something or doing something, we keep the old way as a kind of backup in case we have trouble with the new way. And in fact in the process of learning the new way, we get to use the old model as an internal guide to help with the new one, because we don't absorb things instantly, it takes some repetition. What usually happens though, is that the old model had a lot more pieces and was a lot more complex, in addition to just not always working correctly, and the new model often is just faster and with bigger sturdier pieces, so we can think quicker and more reliably. i should talk about everyone else. I just don't really care what everyone else thinks or does or says. It's almost never interesting. I pretend to care. I mean it's almost no effort to act as if i really give a fuck about any of the bullshit that they say or do. But really for me it is endless lifelessness and despair. Give me a reason why i might be interested. And it's like, there is no connection at all. If i never saw them again (and that's what i'm hoping) it would be just fine with me. There have been plenty of people i've seen that i will never see again, and it bothers me not at all, i have turned down opportunities where i could have seen them again. Everybody else except... July 16, 1997 rubber soul, quite the blast from the past. "i just can't go on, if you won't see me" i keep a couple of rat traps by my bed. in case i really get desparate, i can always catch rats. what is it that is so hard about putting dishes in the dishwasher. i mean i've heard proposals that we need robots to do that. O.k., rinsing them off takes a couple of seconds, and you have to wipe them, but a lot of dishwashers don't even need you to do that. Could it be having to bend over or stoop? that's almost work and could be perceived as work i guess. If that is a problem, they could just put dihswashers up a little higher. i just heard about a way my life could get significantly better if i just had a little more money. typical. i am working at such a deficit, that i would have to run fast to stand still. like getting on a down escalator from the bottom, i always end up at the bottom. It's like if i try to do anything, it only reminds me that i already lost, and i get discouraged and have to stop, and those people in the way don't help. i donut know you. there is no 1 out there. where you gonna go? nowhere, because there's no one like you. I had strangely vivid dream (and i know how other people hate to hear other people's dreams so this is an assertion that i don't think anyone is reading this.) I was giving a party. I remember i was explaining, to one guy who had gotten on my computer to write a computer message to a group, about a different theories of communication. Some people expect to get a pure abstract information and some people want to receive the full experience of whatever is happening, and you need to have a little bit of both to satisfy everyone. Well, the party was closing down and everyone was leaving, but there was this one woman --i didn't remember her name--who just sort of hung around at the end after everyone else left. She had really nice, big, long, wavy, dark hair. I remember thinking i like that kind of thing, and i appreciate that it must be a lot of work and is bothersome. It's something a woman might do if she is still trying to distract guys. And she really didn't say to much and didn't look at me directly very much, and i do sort of like the quiet type of girl. But it really showed that i didn't really know how to handle her or what to say to her. And i was wondering if she was waiting for someone. i put up a new nanocad page on geocities. a free account. i just received a thing from hotwired saying they let members have free pages July 15, 1997 there is stuff that i want to do and i try it a little but maybe it's a little trouble to get to it and it doesn't become a habit and i let it slip, even though i do still want to get back to it. Then there is stuff that is just so convenient that i do it a lot right off and it does become a habit, even if i really don't want to do it a lot. There are various things like that that i try to quit. And unfortunately programming for fun just hasn't gotten to be a habit yet. Updating the index is also not a habit It seems like in school they would often teach you the hard way to do something and then teach you an easier way, but if they really want you to know both ways, i think the should teach the easy way first, and then the hard way, so you can go back to the easy way to check or if you get lost, because no one would ever go back to the hard way, they would just do it the easy way wrong over and over. Also typically, there is a harder way that gives you more options or flexibility or something, so there is a real reason to know both. but if you teach it so all they want to do is forget about the hard way, now that there is an easy way, they just won't go back to it, and won't appreciate the difference. People can actually count differently than computers, for small numbers, and better, i think. That is, people can count, say, 4 things at a glance by recognizing the shape, whereas the only computer procedure is one by one. And estimating quantity in general can be a pattern thing. creating and manipulating types can associations is a major thing that people do that computers haven't done much of as yet. This is a similar problem as counting in that computers generally do everything in a one at a time way but people handle bunches together and many layers at once. Lisp is about list processing, but it maintains that one at a time, sequential quality instead of a more human-like shifting of piles quality. And it always irks me how the natural language people always see he goal as creating something that wakes up and understands language, instead of something that has to learn language and communication like all of us. Not only is it likely to be easier to make something that has to learn language, it's going to actually be necessary because ways of talking can change even in the course of a discussion. It's harder for them to imagine i'm sure, because we can't look at the steps in learning very easily, because we can't talk to people who can't talk, and we can look at the language itself. They're playing with the words and not the head They should bring the computer to the language and not the language to the computer. I mean they all work to find ways to do wild manipulations and calculations so that computers can handle language in the ways that computers like to handle all data, storing exactly, "comparing" exactly, operating with little context in exactly the same way. Whereas human language output is a product of all the desires and ways we have learned to manipulate people and what people think. Attempts to put languange into the computers world will have trouble because most of the functions in language don't have correspondences in computers. Computers are a tool to do certain things, but if computers don't actually do what language is used for, it wouldn't even make sense to think that computers could use language. So what does language do? A person will have a particular image of a scene or something happening, and the brain takes pieces of that scene and finds the words associated with them, and links them together in the culturally traditional (learned) way. Eventually people aren't even too away of the original scene, and some of the elements can become non-visual or abstract. Understanding tries to recreate that scene. The image could be part of an imagined image of a goal, or a remember image of something in the past. The mind is constantly sifting through old images and creating imaginary ones. I looked a little at the VHDL stuff. (vlsi hardware description language, kind of a language for describing computer chips). it seems pretty neat, and i might have to practice it. July 14, 1997 oops, missed a day. nothing much happening, really a fun fact: earlier this decade my shrink was a chief resident at stanford. small world. so i took my car in to be really worked on, and every mechanic always asks me if i really want to bother saving this car. but i feel you shouldn't just give up on something just because there is a little trouble. My childhood friend aubrey from across the street in mempho had a black cat named shadow (actually i got this story from his mom some time when the old folks were over for dinner or something). Shadow was really pretty old and was just a bunch of bones, and she was saying maybe they should put him to sleep. Aubrey wasn't happy with that at all and said well she was old, how would she feel if they put her to sleep. and i took the bus back. I haven't even ridden a bus since i don't remember maybe when my parents and i were visiting freddie in the early 80s in SF, and i don't think i've ever ridden by myself. Just never been too far to walk and me no car or ride. It was pretty non-memorable. Although they stopped at a turn off at a school, and then pulled out to get back in the road, but while we were waiting, there were some kids that wanted to get on, maybe they did have a bad attitude, but they didn't get on that bus. And it took maybe another half a minute sitting there before we could get in the road. It looks pretty warm today. Maybe i should go down to the beach so bill gates is still rich, and he made a lot of money. But let's remember the point of capitalism. We allow people to be rich so we can get something out of it, we expect them to invest and build. What has bill done? what has bill built? What did bill ever do himself that wasn't something microsoft did? gates to me is a failure of capitalism, or at least i haven't seen whatever evidence there might be that his having alot of money benefits anyone. Even bill himself. what has bill gotten out of it that his first ten million wouldn't get him? A lack of diversity is harmful and prevents growth

July 12, 1997 a fitful, fevered dark night, teatime for the soul. So in Contact the reigious anti-technology asks if the world is a better place with all this technology. At least one thing demonstrates that it is. We have aspirin. a simple bit of technology that takes away and does make life better. I'm sorry if technology may be taken for granted, but let's not say we aren't happier because of it. Anyway, happiness isn't necessarily something that it would be good to have all the time, but more of a teacher to guide us in what we should do. (It'ss really probably outdated for that, though) I have been reading the comics in the daily paper for most of my life, as a kind of ritual i supposed, but lately i han't relate to any of that stuff, since it relates to home and work, and none of seems at all funny to me. so i think i'll give it up. people feel superior that if there are some mysteries in the world that they know about that science can't explain.Nyah, nyah, i know something you don't know. And its a powerful feeling to think that way, but it's just a feeling, and can be harmless, but it can really limit their possibilities. Real knowledge is much more exciting, and that is just grasping. A really creative person must be a leader too, because he has to persuade everyone that what he is doing is significant and valuable. July 11, 1997 Now i have a cold, and i have some sinus pain. well i did until i took some aspirin. an important thing when you are sick is to eat a lot, because your body is generally doing a lot of work. I saw some job people and we worked on the resume. we're looking to flesh it out some and make it apply to me more personally, to show what kind of an asset i would make, that i can contribute, and that i can quickly learn new skills. i'll need to put something about that nanocad stuff, if it gets much further. it is quite possible to explore the spirit materially, instead of trying to keep it as a mystical and unexplainable thing. Spirit has to do with certain types of responses and feeling that people have that they can't attribute to any kind of memory or experience. Often a spiritual reaction is very powerful and affecting and possibly unavoidable, like a deep sense of awe at certain things. But these are simple and understandable emotions, and probably understanding could take them away, depend on the situation. One example is the powerful ability people have to deny death, and how happy and motivated they can feel by a simple psychological pseudoproblem (ie. denying something obviously true like all people eventually stop working and never start up again, and believing they will come back). It's a very profound effect, but simply understood, and perhaps it is a good quirk to have. The idea that everything has a purpose is alos a powerful spiritual idea, but it's a simple delusion that just happens to work well, often better than any more reasonable idea. But it's important to understand to what end it works. possibly it's just an idea that simply maintains certain aspects of the complicated web of interactions that society maintains. You can't simply drop a single idea or behavior; you would need to replace a complicated web, since a lot of pieces would unravel. The nano stuff seems actually to be moving along. On irc #nano last night, i talked to one of the founders of the group, doug. An energetic computer kid David showed up, a hardcore CS student, and he seemed like he might actually do some code. And the really big dude Bill Spence signed on from Hawaii, which is 3 hours difference, so it was already late and he just got home. I can actually work with that. I am still arranging to set up the applet running what we have so far. I think something to focus on will be very helpful, but it needs to be on a different werver than mine. There was a mention of getting and account on geocities. What we really need is a procedure where people can pick from a list of things to be done, and they can work on that as they like, with lots of posting of who is working on what so no one steps on anyone else's work. Im not really sure how to manage a really loose group, especially with no effective pressure. I have to make it convenient to do work. I saw some of Contact, but the sound went bad, and after i lost track of the plot, i left. I also was having this sinus pain and i was fairly glad for the escape. And it was going pretty slow actually and i hadn't gotten much sleep. The science was quite good, so i still like it. And jodie was playing the kind of girl i strongly lust after. So i intend to finish it when i feel better, and hopefully they'll have the sound fixed. I was a little concerned about the problem of showing a language based on mathematics, but they seemed to work with it, and how they would show pictures. I don't know why it hadn't occured to me that they would just send video signals (i mean, obviously!). There is a goofball antitechnologist religious guy. I just don't see what she sees in him, but i think it was just his aggresiveness. Ooo that really burns me. July 10, 1997 talk about your slow newsdays. I got nothing here. I added my bookmarks to my additional links, so i have a lot more stuff. a lot of nanocad stuff, some people. My java nanocad port is just about to the point where it will run on a browser, but i need to find a place to put it, and then i can work on improving it. I should get access to the orange team site, maybe. Lots of ripe plums, one tree is too tall to pick all of them, but it's so big they are really good So i think wynne has been showing up in my dreams some, lately. In this one she was pregnant. i didn't actually interact with her, i just saw that she was pregnant. i take this as a sign that i am really letting go, in a deep kind of way. time for some thoughts on time travel. there is an article in the mensa bulletin with people's letters about time travel. 90% said time travel was impossible (or something lame like you only travel forward). A couple really clueless people said it was possible, one said it had to be possible because of his (her? 'Francis') psychic dreams. But there weren't any real arguments against it, the most popular one being that we haven't seen any time travellers, so it must not be possible, but that doesn't prove anything. The more rational argument might be that we do seem to have a law of causality that things in the future don't affect things in the past, but that would be saying like time travel just is impossible because it is impossible. I you and your friend jane and were to do a time travel experiment.. you wait with jane ten minutes and then jane sits in the room and you travel back to the room five minutes earlier and meet jane. Is that possible? wasn't that different from what just happened to you in that room? wouldn't that be contradictory to what just happened? Maybe you could go to a different parallel universe, but that hasn't been shown to nature of reality, that parallel worlds exist. Really it is a misinterpretation of the many worlds interpretation of QM, which doesn't actually say that the other worlds go on to have seperate independent existences, but rather that they add together to create the world we see. The very notion of the same place at a different time is confused, because plnets are moving, solar systems are moving, galaxies are moving. Everything is shifting, so there isn't really a property of maintaining a location over time. Nature of the universe questions can be very tricky. But there are some kinds of locally measurable things that seems pretty stable, like relative position, energy. I think that according to uncertainty principles, small particles do jump back in time in a sense over short periods. And if you could set up a booth at the receiving time, you could receive people into the past, but without this technology today, we aren't able to do that. And we should also recognize that instant teleportation or any kind of faster than light travel is pretty equivalent to time travel. July 9, 1997 so the people with all the money and power want to keep the system where only a few people have all the money and power, and the poor suckers who aren't elite just want to become elite and not create a fairer system. I got a little more insight into the genetic nature of this fidelity thing, it could just be a consequence of really not liking losing somebody, with the ability to empathize with the loser in any story about cheatin' hos. Archetypes in general may be an aspect of certain types of common emotional reactions that people have. It's very hard to have a real memory imprinted in DNA. It's just must more likely that certain emotional responses are just more likely for some people, in a cumulative way such that there are very definite common patterns. the buddhist idea of enlightenment could be construed as a participation in these eternal or timeless forms, stopping the world is sort of description of escaping the grip of convention time. The christian heaven can also be seen as a timeless thing, instead of just something lasting a long time. In this way, nirvana and heaven can actually be seen as the same kind of thing, although christianity builds a little bit more on the denial of death and a physcial kind of temporal afterlife, which may be more psychologically effective. I've been working a little more on the nanocad thing. Windows event handling is making it really tough to do a common kind of computer thing, just inputting data from the keyboard. I really don't get haow it's supposed to happen for sure. It isn't kosher to just wait() the thread for the input, because that disables the keyboard! You have to have another thread, and it can wait on the keyboard, but im having some trouble getting the keyboard handing thread to notify() the other thread. And it gave me weird unhelpful messages when it didn't like one of my variables to be static. But i'm moving along, and learning stuff. My car looks grim. new ignition wires didn't do it. It could be the injectors, but i strongly suspect that its something wrong with the cylinder head or the gasket. People said there was trouble but the engine ran ok. it might have gotten worse. I called one good mechanics place and they said it could be down for a week if they remachine everything, the machine shops being busy. But that could improve the compression. I'm about ready to be done with it. I could pressure check it to really diagnose it. but i don't know anything about that, so... My working credit card was denied. now i have to use another one. I guess i'm getting pretty desperate.

July 8, 1997 [#phil]ah, yes. i don't like games. all games require deception and deception is evil. in fact deception is a residue of human weakness it is much better that humanity seek to be strong, rather than to practice its weakness. specifically, it would be technologically possible to eliminate all deception. and that's considered a bad thing! well i talked to gina vick on irc and picked right off what my problem was. It's the almost girlfriend that is the hardest. You get hooked on the hope that there could be something more and it's hard to let it go. For me that kind of trivializes my problem, but that's good, it was mostly just a mistake, and i let it become more than it should have been. im reading more about what a really successful smart person does. its important to find a good mentor to learn the preformance standards and some taste for what are good projects. there's some indication that the more creative people have trouble at home early in life. and an effective guy tends to take after his dad, and is introverted. i don't know if its just more propaganda, but in Science there is an article on the dangers of marijuana. Supposedly it does activate some of the neural stuff that the really addicted drugs like heroin and cocaine affect, so it could be addictive and could actually be a gateway drug, like the propaganda says. There was another meeting on #nano, about the project, and a bunch of the important people showed up. I'm not sure what they are actually doing, but there seems to be forward movement. They talked about getting a new ISP for all the traffic they expect to generate. They are just college kids, mostly, a little dreamy. And they expect me to do a lot of work for them. I'm still not to sure about that. But the guy supposed to be in charge of the program put me nomininally in charge of one of the pieces of it. Presumably i could get other people to do stuff for me, if they are interested. Unlikely perhaps, but these guys really don't seem to have any concept of a team working on a project, and with out that, they are totally doomed. July 7, 1997 I saw Face off. For the first half hour i was considering walking out. The science of the thing was absurd. but after i could forget about that silly stuff and they settle down into some medium action adventure, with some artsy miami vice kind of stuff, it was entertaining. And they went for this, you become your enemy stuff that was mildly interesting, i guess, but i just couldn't believe that there was a real switch. I want his face off! If china become the dominant world power, it's likely that japan will reinvent itself as chinese (instead of american) again, like it tried to do a long time ago. There is a common question 'why do we dream?' but there is a mistake in that question. Why do we have elbows? You can ask what we use them for now that we have them, but we have them because one of our distant ancestors had them, and in evolution having something means you stumble on it randomly and maybe that creature survives, and it is necessary that the trait is needed itself but generally things that help creature out tend to make it. A lot of stuff is fairly arbitrary. Well, anyway, dreams occurred very early in the mammal lineage, if not at the beginiing because supposedly all mammals dream, i don't know any details about this. We can guess that the little shrew ancestors didn't spend o whole lot of quiet time while they were awake (too busy surviving) thinking about life and making plans and analyzing their mistakes, and presumably being able to do it when they were quietly sleeping would have been quite an advantage. entertertainment is a way to waste time. sort of like how candy is empty calories we eat because we developed a need for sugar because it was associated with fruit which has vitamins. The need for storytelling is a communication thing, which has some social value. Music may have had courtship function. I'm listening to the smithereens. I saw them once at 616 with wade. It was pretty cool, but this album has a lot of filler. Well, if she couldn't like me then i'd be kind of doomed, because she was about as close to my type as i was likely to find (and i don't mean rich). She was kind of my hero, very inspiring, the kind of person i would like to have become, but i guess i gave that up now, didn't i? We decide how things are, it isn't just a matter of finding out how the world is anymore, although mostly people still have a discovery mind and not a creation mind.

July 6, 1997 I'm frustrated. that's probably the best way to put it. thinking about the way i was, i'd probably want to avoid myself. but really i'm different now. I actually help somebody with some html. She said i was an "adorable man". that was different. Maybe i should consider consulting our tech support. I need to try some temp places. So i get an actual chrysler radiator cap and it tested ok, but a new off brand cap didn't. i guess i'll stick with original manufacture. and definitely get new ignition wires.

July 5, 1997 i saw men in black. it was very good, funny, strong characters, guns just what i like, strange, which i like. but somehow the energy and the spielberg cutesy happiness (i guess he got it from disney, but they aren't as bad), just didn't inspire me as i'd like. It was too meaningless. tommy lee jones is cool, be i thought will smith was a little unbelievable. jones is pining for someone, and will smith say the its better to have love and lost junk. jones says 'try it'. generally, not enough emotional content. It was good, but i don't feel like seeing it again. i was sitting next to these japanese girls. i think i'm pretty hard up drove the car to santa cruz, change the fuel filter, i think maybe the injectors are dirty. or it could be loose ignition wires, they don't make the original distributor cap for my car anymore. it had a metal slit that the ignition wires latch to the metal bits, and i wanted to change the cap, but only had wires for the old better cap. I got a new all platic cap, but i didn't get the wires. the guy say's he'll find out and call me. The bad possibility is that finally the cylinder head leak has started to affect performance. It doesn't seem to be as bad when it gets warm, but ooccasionally it sputters. And the starter stuck once, today, that's a nightmare. there were some things i should have done, but didn't. but because i didn't do those, nothing i have done is anything July 4, 1997 surprise, surprise. the car is back together with a new oxygen sensor, although it seems to still be a little rough, i didn't go out on the open road with, tomorrow i will try to go into town to get a new radiator cap, this one seems to vent at 13psi instead of 16, which could be causing trouble, but at least now i can take it to a mechanic if anything else is wrong. i think maybe the injectors might be clogged, too. It's independence day. i just don't feel very free. What could i do better? i could be more generous, more fun, less serious, less scary, more patient, more emphatic, more attentive. There was a classic Star Trek, the one with the prison planet and the booth with the brainwashing light fixture and the chair. It's so about television and how society can make you think anything and it was meant for good, but got into the wrong hands. And they made kirk think he was in love with someone. Dig it. my penny price: if you like reading this stuff, i'd like you to talk about it. what makes a person hold their feelings to themselves. maybe they don't know what their feelings are, people have to learn to tell what they are thinking. there is the whole cultural think of being brave and not showing weakness which gets some people never to show any feeling. or maybe you are just not part of their inner circle of friends and they don't feel good about letting their guard down. One of the most important things in learning and thinking is the ability to repress undesired associations when learning new ones. There was an experiment with little kids seeing what kind of mistakes they make in simple addtion. the most common problem would be like saying 3+3=4 and 3+4=5, just adding one to the second number, sort of just counting insead of adding. i much better way to coun on your fingers, the approach in the abacus and in roman numerals. let the four fingers be ones and thumb be fives, and on the other hand fingers tens and thumb fifty. There are ways to do arithmetic like this, too. You can count to 100 with two hands. If you used a binary system, you could count to 1000, though. There is a problem in multitasking operating systems called starvation. Although in real computer operating systems, this is known about and avoided, it is possible that a low priority task might never get any time to operate as all the higher priority processes take up all the cpu time. But people aren't quite so cleverly designed, and it happens that sometimes we don't spend the time on things that we need to do, and they never get done. It's the same kind of time management problem. i got the nanocad port compiled but not running and put up a page to access the files. I wrote a post to the team bulletin board about it, but i haven't heard any response.

July 3, 1997 if the physicists talk about consciouness, why don't they talk about religion i drove my brother's BMW533i today. It was ok, it was having some electrical problem and the window is stuck down. Another car that i've done some small but debilitating damage to. i've been working on porting a program called nanocad from c++ to java, It was originally written in scheme, a dialect of lisp, and isn't fully ported to c++ so i may have to go back to the originally scheme. This is for the nanocomputer projects, and at the meeting, there was a guy who said he was working on it as a way of learning java, so he may be lower on the learning curve than i. I remember java can be a real pain. He mentioned a web pages describing the differences between c++ and java and i looked at it a little, but maybe not all of it, but cause it was pretty short and i don't remember it mentioning very many differences, but my experience has been that there are many, many small differences between c++ and java, and i suppose they could be just specific aspects of the general differences described. But is isn't quite as simple as that web page seems to make it out 2B. Doing this port (translation) a lot of times i just have to see what the c++ and rewrite the line in java, although most of the basic code is the same. This guy had an irritating fondness for using pointer to functions as a convenience instead of a necessity, and it is very unconvenient in java, but i understand that doing it this way is a traditional way to do things in the original langauage, scheme. It seems like when i'm programming, i don't think of many philosophical things. There is a joke i've seen a few times about 'practicing' for sex, but this doesn't seems so funny to me because i have seen in several places a technique to actually practice for better sex. The idea is to masturbate up until the point of no turning back. Just as you're about to have orgasm, you reach a point where if you continue, you wouldn't be able to stop yourself. Becoming aware of this point is one learned skill that can be practice. You should then slow down or stop at this point for a little while, and build up again. If you take these breaks over and over, you end up with a longer and much more intense experience. And it perfectly open to practice. I wonder if that's in the kama sutra? The bummer about not having a car is that i'm missing all the summer blockbusters, and i wanted to go see men in black. July 2, 1997 The desire for power or control, which is a universal need, isn't quite the same as the desire for domination, a desire to crush your enemies. Real power would come from joining together to get your wants done, but domination is just divisive, you being right and the other person being wrong. For example, little girls pretty quickly learn that daddy is easily maniuplated, but they don't actually try to crush his spirit. Wynne was beat me at time when i was really competitive, i mean severely whipped and demoralized me, she was so clearly that much better than me. Sure, i like to pretend that i was just in love with her, that would be an easy explanation, but the truth is she really rocked my soul to the foundations more as an obstacle i couldn't break through. So i made a decision, it was a conscious decision although i did really understand at the time her part in it, and i tended to rationalize it in other ways. I decided to give up the simple quest for more and more conventional knowledge and instead to seek only real wisdom, forsaking memorization. To some extent, this was just switching the game to something i could win. And that's why it was important to see wynne again, so i could throw it in her face, or at least see if i had won this second contest. But that would have been a little childish i know, and who knows, but maybe she might have even beaten me again. We are very different now, i don't know if we could even really communication. I have been thinking that it would be nice to tell wynne some of the stuff i know, but it seems like that would only be a part of my demonstrating my victory in this matter. Sure, i was a little angry with her, but i'm a little better. From joe, love violates the social morality. It is very personal and not something controlled by what you should or shouldn't do. Love can make you break off from other obligations, and even break the law. Marriages used to be arranged and marriages for love dissolved that social arrangement. Another little bit, in the Persian idea of hell, satan loves god more than any other angel and when he refuses to bow to man, it's from this love of god not pride. Being in hell is the separation from the beloved. I'm getting really sick of mystics, with their little hidden truths and even more hidden agenda. They probably mostly want to control you, for various reasons. On monday i had a meeting on irc about the little distributed java applet for nanocomputer design. They didn't really seem like they had much of grasp of the problem, they seemed only interested in doing a PR stunt. But there is a possiblity that using multiple computers would never be faster that doing it on one computer, which would make the project just a waste of time, done for publicity, but to me only showing that they don't know what they are doing. I try to look at the deep natures of people. This love your enemies stuff, supposedly jesus' main message, it's contradictory. I mean are they your enemy or not? It would make sense to say 'don't have enemies' or 'love everyone' but 'love your enemies'? it's no wonder people are confused. Today though, the world is too small to have enemies. In the wide open spaces of the ancient desert, that made sense. July 1, 1997 it makes a little more sense to me now, that relationships should be totally for the woman to decide, since ultimately, they might end up with all the work. So, june was a no-wynne month, and maybe i should see where i stand on subject.. She was nice, that was a long time ago, i could have moved on, but i didn't really have anywhere to move to. No time like the present to make your future. What will i do? Where will i go? maybe i don't really care, maybe it just doesn't matter. It's complicated.