a barbarian journal

• May 31, 1997

I've been fairly bad at not trying to recognize guilt and shame feelings. I guess i just never really got into that, but i think that they must have been the real emotional basis for my bad attitude about people. So maybe i will be a nicer guy. From the way i am acting on irc, i think my attitude has improved. It seems like this shame and guilt is a big source for just unrecognizable bad feeling.

I tried to go to the beach, but when traffic was bad at bear creek road, i took a longer way that went up a big hill and my car overheated. It looked like it might have been ok but i chickened out just about at the top just before it went into the red. I stopped for a while to wait for it to cool off, but the water was full. It's that darn blown head, maybe i better just break down and have it fixed. Frustrating, like my life.

I think, with the state of technology as it is, if i was to spend a lot of time on it (generally that would mean i would need to be paid) i could probably develop an intelligent machine in a reasonable time. That is, i think the ability is there now; it's just a matter of sitting down to it.

• May 30, 1997

I never held it against her that she didn't like me, but she was always a little afraid of me, and i thought that was unfair. So what happened. I felt ready to confront wynne, and i paged her. I was figuring she would just ignore, but she didn't know who it was, and she seemed a little upset that it was me, anyway she was busy so could she call me back. I thought this was good because i knew i had surprised her. Although i figured maybe she wouldn't call back, she did. She said she got my letter, and was going to e-mail me but she decided to look at my web pages and such and there was stuff that really worried her. I can't blame her for that, so she felt she shouldn't contact me, and i should just forget about it. As text, that is all fine, but there was a weird emotional subtext; she seemed noticeably afraid and angry that i had called and i don't know but there must have been some kind of deep resentment or contempt. It seemed clear to me that she felt i should be ashamed or guilty for trying to contact her (at least i felt that way for a few minutes during and after, but pretty soon i realized that i had nothing to feel bad about, it was just a projection). I was perfectly fine with her just not wanting to hear from me, but it seemed important to her that i understand her feelings and that i was the bad guy here. I can live with that too. But there was a strange twist after her spiel; she said she had to go, she had a patient, unless i had something to say, she wanted to give me a chance to say something if i had anything to say. (i mean did she have to go or not) By this time i was maybe getting a little angry myself, and i considered saying something about how in the last month i thought i had made some real progress and changes in how i felt, which was why i was calling now, but i knew that could only sound lame now and she made it clear how she felt so really there was nothing to say. Unforgiven, as it were. i think she has always thought i was a creep, i just haven't been sensitive to her feelings (i think she explained all this before). If i knew she didn't want to see me, i wouldn't want to see her. But what did she want me to say? Did she want me to grovel? I guess she was looking for some kind of apology, or for me to accept some kind of blame or responsibility, or to assuage her fears, or maybe relieve her of some guilt or whatever. But the problem with my doing something like that, as i understood it, is that i would have to be her friend in order to help her with her feelings like that, just because there must be some element of trust for anything i say to have any kind of good effect. And i sure would have loved to, but she made it clear that i never was, nor ever would be, her friend. There is some scene in one of the Jackie Chan movies, i wish that some day we could sit together and have tea. It happens. "Have a nice life."

But there is still the matter of my feelings. I'm a little concerned that her feelings about me seemed to be the same, but i would expect that since feelings don't change by themselves. I don't really know what medical school has done for her attitude, but she is a really hard worker and determined and seems happy. I hate being judged on what i might do in the future, but i guess that's what all judging is about. What bothers me the most is i have helped make her world a little colder, she would be much better if i could erase all trace of my existence out of the cloth of her life, but i can't, and i really have no more responsibility in this matter, but i still feel an obligation. The only thing i can really do is learn from this experience and strive to help others. i have wronged a good person, what can i do? What have i learned: the specific fact that wynne really dislikes me (mostly i don't care about specifics, more of a general principle person); a little about emotional dynamics in a conversation and how far i need to go; how i have poor emotional control in conversation; a readiness to guilt and shame but an easy ability to discard it when inappropriate; that i cannot always help; that frustration includes guilt, which may be discardable; problems of miscommunication, including not listening and not expressing (comm also includes acknowledgement and protocols in general); the importance of trust; a real ability to let go.

I have really worked on the index, although i only of 1 in three months. It seems to be really helping me. I get to see the stuff been doing, and seeing how lame it is can only inspire me to try to be better. Being able to look back quickly should help me to fill out subjects that i have new things to say. One good thing in idea formation is to be able to react to different ideas other that what is in your head right this minute, and going back to update older ideas can work. I hope this index might eventually make a nice kind of overview, too.

• May 29, 1997

why are french people so rude? They probably are very nice to people close to them, maybe too many invasions has made them xenophobic, although other countries have that problem too.

I like to be silly, but it doesn't really qualify as a sense of humor. Humor is so often based on repressed feelings of hostility that i think its not too bad not to have have your average mean-spirited sense of humor, but still it would be nice to have a better ability to make some people that i like laugh. My natural tendency to be silly is sometimes funny, but it isn't consistent and predictable like some funny people with their finger firmly on the pulse of people's funny bone.

Distributed applets (one's that use the computers of the people reading the page in addition to the main page) don't have to stop when the connection is broken, if like on mine, the browser can stay open when the netconnection is broken, the applet could save up calculations done offline and submit them when the connections are made. This might need some monitoring at the host to keep track of which computers are able to work offline, or how reliable they are. In general there should probably be some profiling of the worker computers, and maybe some type of short benchmark at the beginning. Of course this might be a lot of programming effort to get something out of slow computers, when it's probably best to run things on a fast local area network. Still, it's something to look at.

i hold a dream
she holds me
i wonder how anything so wonderful could exist in this broken
twisted evil world
But she's not a thing, but
a person, a capacity
for good and evil
Evil always looks good to
me, when it's hers

i feel small to be away from her
I could never be so green
i am only spired
I race her, she wins,
but at least i get the exercise
Well, i say i race her.
She just runs for the breeze
on her face
To be effortlessly beaten,
Maybe she's waits.
silly!

• May 28, 1997

There is some shame in feeling gratitude. In fact the japanese thank you (sumanai) is almost like saying i'm sorry, which in the west has some real shame. Most western thank you's are pretty empty, though.

Been getting some stuff about waco on QV. I thought the fires were probably started by lamps getting knocked over and people couldn't get out because the tanks jammed the doors. But it turns out that the tear gas canisters were also quite able to start fires, and weren't supposed to be used, according to the manual, when there was risk of the building catching on fire. maybe they had it coming, but the government could expect reprisals if they're going to do stuff like that.

The nanocomputer stuff has lead me to a link about distributed applets. This Shows how you can use the computers that access your applet to run calculations for you, like a kind of supercomputer. That particular page uses the browser computer for ray-tracing, a graphics thing. The applet receives a small problem, works on it and sends it back to the main system. This setup could be great on a LAN if java were reasonably fast. I really want to do something like this, but you have to be able to run applets on the server and i don't have an account for that. You also need a page that people tend to leave on, like maybe one of those porn sites. The nanocomputer group is working on something like that. I should probably try to get on that team. I think it could do wonderful things for computing. The new java has more support for such things, too. Yeeha.

When i was walking on the beach, i was really thinking how so much of us developed because our ancestors lived on the beach. Our hair disappeared really quick because if you are really furry and you come out of the water you get really cold and sick a lot. Tears are another aquatic thing. Our feet, instead of just essentially being hands like apes are now much more like flippers. The whole standing up-right thing makes a lot more sense because there is marginal benefit to being able to stand a little taller for a little longer in the water gathering fish food and mussels while not quite being able to stand up completely on land; i mean it didn't have to happen all at once, some of the middle steps were still useful. The use of rocks to crack open shellfish was certainly on of the best first uses of tools (later, breaking open dried bones on land opened up whole new worlds to live in). Those flotation devices were probably helpful, too.

• May 27, 1997

I talked to emiko some about amae. She said it was like how you would feel about your parents, something like fusion, a dissolving of boundaries. It's an assumption that you can act like a baby, which is really frowned on in the west. There is also a concept of enryo or holding back. Japanese people develop an in group of people where the ideal is not to have to hold anything back and amae to each other.

I've been in a bad mood over the weekend. I thinks its from not exercising.

• May 26, 1997

I saw a little snake by the woodpile. Black with a thin white stripe.

I heard about a list of academic journals.

Religion is organized crime, and science has been very careful to stay away from their racket.

If you genetically designed a creature, it could create dna to encode things it learns and send that back to the cells. This would be unusual and doesn't happen in nature, but if you wanted to have new creatures that know everything that the parent knew, and all the immune information, it might be an interesting approach. Dynamically generating dna wouldn't be a simple thing, though.

You know you're in trouble when less than half of what you tell yourself is true.

i am nothing.

• May 25, 1997

I'm reading some of The anatomy of dependence by Takeo Doi, which was recommended by a little nip on irc named emiko. It talks about a concept called amae which is a desire like a baby has to its mother, to be passively loved, a kind of dependence need, a kind of trust that the other guy will let you be self-indulgent and childish. It's some kind of a Japanese thing and i don't quite get it, but i know i came to some kind of understanding that frustration of similar feelings in me caused me to be very angry at people. Now i am not so angry as disappointed.

The new Pentium II has a cache that is not as good as the Pentium pro which it is replacing, It's cheaper, half as fast, and doesn't use ECC (error correction), so it won't be used in big business servers (until they add it). The Pentium pro had a similar problem in not being as good as the pentium in 16 bit operations. What is Intel's deal?

It's nice to have the car running on all 4 spark plugs.

May 24, 1997 I saw addicted to love. Meg Ryan was really attractive the attitude, something about the toughness and evilness maybe, plus the vulnerability. Most of the characters were way too immature, though. And the story was pretty silly. Broderick was a little too sensitive, and you wonder what they are doing the other 23.9 hours of the day. And its kind of a chick movie, but i thought it was ok. There was a moment that was good for me, where seeing someone really in love with someone else and they make a better couple can really help you let go. I had that, but i think it wore off.

I also watched 5th element again, not really worth it but my clocks mislead me. and i just missed the showing of the other movie. She seemed to say "senoata gamat", but willis said she said "ecto gamut". Star trek 6 was on. that was good. "2b or not 2b" was rendered something like "tach va, tach bech" I haven't checked in the dictionary yet.

A future fighter shouldn't carry a rifle in his hand, takes up both arms and isn't very accurate anyway. A better design is having it mounted (and stabilized) on shoulder or on his pack and with computer targeting (so some type of multispectral imaging also), patched in to his goggle viewscreen. It could then maintain locks on the various targets, with enough accuracy to go for the nonlethal hits and minimize ammo, possibly beltfed or some type of lighter plastic case. But certainly hands free at least. And give him a motorbike or something for god's sake. mobility and targeting.

I saw a cool article about the traveling salesman problem in Unix Review, June 1997, by jon Bentley. The simplest algorithm, recursively trying every combination, takes a minute for 10 cities. The fastest version can do 30 cities in two minutes instead of the 160 billion billion years for the simple algorithm. It uses the following speedups: fixing one city (divide time by n), storing sum of edge distances so far on path(/2, it is also suggested to convert floating to integer by multiplying by 1000, but fp is often as fast as integer), storing distances between points in 2d array(/5), checking the path sum so far and leaving branch if its already larger than the minimum path so far (speedup seems proportional to n, maybe exponential), (this one is tricky) using the minimum spanning tree (October '96) of the cities not yet in the path as a minimum bound for the rest of the path and pruning the branch when the sum of the path so far plus the minimum spanning tree distance is larger than the minimum total distance so far (just a check on the potential total path length) (another big increase, possibly exponential), caching min spanning tree distances (/20), sorting nodes to do nearest cities first (not much improvement on uniform points, better on other distributions).

When i was in college, doug and i found this girl Pamela Sue Heady who had a O(n^2) algorithm for the traveling sales program that won some high school science fair or something. Doug wanted to write a bus routing program for the city or some such. The thing for me was, i didn't know if it was a solution or just a heuristic (which meant it wouldn't always give the absolute shortest answer). I wasn't really sure if it could get stuck in local minima and there might be a better solution out there or what. There is a class of problems called NP (non-deterministic polynomial time), that have slow (exponential) solutions, but they are all equivalent in hardness, and if you can solve any one of them quickly, you can solve all of them quickly, and n^2 is amazingly fast. So this one stewed in me a while, not knowing where to find the answer. When i came to California in '89, i wrote up the algorithm (PSH had a weird graphical explanation, i put in terms of sequence transforms, you start with a whole path, and for each pair of points you check if swapping those two points will make the path shorter) sent it to the Stanford computer science department with the simple question was it a solution or just a heuristic. I studied EE, not CS, so i didn't know, but it should have been obvious any cs person that it was just a heuristic. And i waited for a couple of weeks, i don't remember, seemed a long enough time to me. The i sent a second letter, a much nastier one, an evil one in fact, because it was at that time that i became disillusioned with their arrogant snobbery, and i really would dread going there, but they do have a the biggest AI setup in this area. Anyway i think Stanford is an evil place. But suddenly they found my first letter, and it said sure enough it was just a heuristic, and the gave me some references to stuff i never found. As a grad student, i first approach Stan Franklin about it, and i think some of them helped me find some stuff about it. Now, with such a good algorithm, a could really check out that heuristic. I wonder where Pamela Sue Heady is now?

I wonder where those kids i teaching assisted are? I'm sure they all have made a lot of money as i sit here. I still haven't read their evaluations, saving them for a laugh some day, i didn't think i had done very well so i quit the program.

• May 23, 1997

who cares about deep blue beating kasparov at chess. What's more important is that computers can beat people in Doom.

I got a new clutch in my car and it feels all different now. I think i messed up the distributor cap, they was some plastic where the connector slips through, and when i cut it, i may have cut it too much and now the cable is loose. The guy says the shocks are about gone, and the exhaust has a rattle, and there's that blown head, he didn't know how much i really i want to put into it. I probably need another one. A job would help.

There is water falling from the sky! what manner of plague is this?

Suck today has a piece on sex dolls, and they mention a realistic style mannequin. eek. I'm not sure he has quite capture the subtleties, but it's just a fantasy fetish thing.

I'm in trouble if i want to become a competitive person again, i was just a kid when i quit, so there are a bunch of stages that i have missed. There are lots of different ways people can claw at you that i haven't dealt with. Lots of ways people try to ingratiate themselves with you so they can use you. A person has to be able to do that stuff and handle it when done to them. So many ways people try to control you, your time, your attention. And all these things happening under different levels of time pressure, trying to juggle things in different ways. There are all kinds of skills i haven't developed, i'm so unprepared it seems foolish as i look at it to think i could even enter the contest. Hmm. All the intuitions that need to be developed, all the techniques and strategies at so many levels. Methods for winning and methods for just hanging on till opportunity arises. It seems much tougher than i first imagined, but again, it is only a relative matter of being slightly better than others. A contest of fractions of an inch.

you can only have a first-time experience once.

• May 22, 1997

Why do people like to have tans? It may be just a fashion, but it used to be that if you had a tan, you either worked outside, which would have been pretty hard and you would be pretty hearty, or you were a person of leisure. To be pale is to be sickly, and stuck inside all the time, and there were lots of germs inside. But The health this is gone, and really all it can mean is that you have so much time, you can waste it be just sitting in the sun. Its also something people get on vacations.

On irc i typed "understanding" instead of "understand", and i know in my head i was thinking understand, people moaned about it, and when i looked back at it the first couple times i thought it said understand, but i finally saw that it actually said understanding. Somewhere in the middle between deciding what to say and the typing, it got messed up. Most of my mistakes are wrong word mistakes and not wrong letter mistakes. I don't know what it is, and really i don't have any introspective access to the parts that are messing up. One thing that might be conclude though is that it is important to get that original thought well out of your head before you proofread.

A norm, the way something is supposed to be or be done, may involve a model about how other people will react to it.

I think the exercise helps my mood pretty consistently.

I have been handling lists in my head in a bad way, if you try to keep every item on the list in your head at the same time, you can get at most seven things, and it gets harder, the closer to seven, but it is possible to somehow just associate a particular slot with an item, while not having to think about all the other elements at the same time, something like knowing the first one is apples, and the fifth one is socks, but not trying to know them all at once. This is actually part of some mnemonic techniques. You could also just learn what comes next and learn a sequence as a collection of links, sort of, likee the way music is learned. But keeping them all at once is needed for doing certain things, like sorting or ranking, which i like to do. Having things written down may be necessary for such operations.

computer just ate a couple pages here, an explanation of nonlinear systems, a thing about causality.

Nonlinearity makes prediction hard. In a linear system, you can add together effects of separate things to find the combined effect. If 10 pounds set on a board bends it 1 inch, then 10 more pounds would bend it another inch, so 20 pounds would bend it 2 inches total, if its acting linearly. 10 more pounds might make it crack and bend a lot more or break even, which would be nonlinear. A single nonlinear property can be handled by itself, but combined with other things, and there usually no direct approach. Often there might be a linear operating region before a nonlinear region, and often its possible to make small predictions without too much error from just assuming linear even though it is curved, for small distances. Any prediction tends to be like that, the further away, the worse the error. Systems with lots of parts, even though you understand the parts separately, when they interact, the combinations and interaction cause errors. Computerized simulations take things in small steps to minimize errors, but the do accumulate. A good control system those can make corrections by measuring errors and feeding them back.

Causality is just another mental tool people use, probably most useful because there are things that happen one way in time, from thermodynamics and thus probability. It also involves the kinds of patterns we see. And it must relate to some property of this universe that creates time.

• May 21, 1997

i keep getting the idea that people are interchangeable, that you can always find another one just as good as this one, but i wonder if is is not just a turning away from the real pain of loss of a relationship.

What are the smallest causal events? (Causation is the main indication of time's arrow) I was thinking it must be chemical, because going from a higher energy state to a lower energy state has clear direction, with the cause being certain colisions between molecules. The key may be collision, a photon 'causes' a state change in an electron orbital, although the real nature of photons is a little up in the air. The tricky thing is that a lot particle physics is pretty reversible, and time isn't even distinct in certain types of diagrams of interactions, being represented as just a direction, and the reactions are reversible in that a photon going into a reaction is the same photon that goes out when it is reversed. Entropy is often blamed, a kind of statistical way that certain patterns have more ways of coming about, so they come about more often. Is causality then just a statement about the likelihood of a certain result in some situation?

Patterns have something to do with examples of that pattern, but they are more than that because of the way we draw correspondences between things.

Nonlinear systems, especially complex ones, are hard to predict. In a linear system, the effect of something added together will be the same as if you added the effects of the things happening separately. An example from mechanics, Say there was a horizontal board sitting on two blocks, and if you put a 10 pound weight on it in the middle, it would bend 1 inch. If it was acting linearly, and you another 10 pound weight, it would bend 2 inches, you could just add the results. You might perdict 30 pounds would bend it 3 inches, but it could start cracking and bend way out of shape 5 inches maybe, or even break. Often things will act linearly for some range, but suddenly act nonlinearly. A lot of prediction can be done if you stay closely to the mostly linear region, and don't make any extreme predictions far from that. The problem of interaction of many particles can be like that, if you just take small jumps, you stay pretty close, but you can't actually solve the exact equation describing them. And little errors usually add up, making the simulation drift away from what would "really" happen, at some point being completely wrong. This is sort of what chaos theory is about. We know the rules of the individual pieces, but we can't combine them together exactly. And its a problem in weather prediction and other various places. A good control system, though, can correct for mistakes that build up.

Causality is bugging me. In general it is undefined, but it is a common intuition. Maybe it's just an intution, which makes it part of the way we think. Our thinking seems to have probabilistic aspects, it isn't a definite thing what we will think usually, although people like to stay in the areas where they are very sure. The whole notion of "if this then that" is a question of cause, and it's import for our understandings of things that the notion of causality has some real substance. but what? Is it just a psychological thing? surely there is some property of this universe that makes it possible for us to perceive cause and effect. Maybe it has to do with irreversibile processes, which involve thermodynamics, which is a probablity thing. Probability is another weird concept, really just a tool for understanding. Actually all concepts are tools. causality is a tool.

• May 20, 1997

I did join the little nanocomputer group, and now i'm on yet another mailing list. Lots of mail for me.

I saw the second half of the odyssey, and while i was watching it, i wanted to see a summary to see if the left anything out. I found a nifty page about Myths and Legends, something i had been wanting to look at for a while. The movie seem strangely literal, that it was just a tale about some guy and his journey home, and it was hard to really get at what the point of the metaphors were. The odyssey is really about struggle of men to settle down into retired home life after their struggle in the workplace, and how the crafty person thinks that he can do without the "gods", or more likely feelings. Maybe that's just my angle. But what are Scylla and Charibides, the six-headed monster and the whirlpool, then? Work can drag you down like a whirlpool and kill you from overwork, or it can just gobble you up and defeat you (maybe something like giving up). (Previously i compared the idea of scylla and carybides to the confilict in ideas of choosing between simple (but false) ideas (ie religious ideas) or facing unanswerable questions that can drag you down and take away a lot of your energy.)

I'm collecting links that i haven't gotten around to looking at.

I'm deciding that i'm just an evil person.

I found out a little more about Deep Blue's Hardware. I knew that it is made of 32 computer nodes, each one basically a PowerPC 135 or 120MHz computer with oodles of memory (256Meg or 1G). But i thought for sure there was some special purpose stuff, but no one talks about it. It turns out that each node has 2 special boards. IBM wants to sell computers, so they would want to downplay that their big machine had to use special purpose stuff, which you can't get to help with your business solution. I think i recall that the special hardware is about evaluating each position and that the main computer is in charge of feeding in all those positions, and probably other types of recordkeeping. But anyway because of the special stuff, it isn't such a big triumph for computers, the main computer wasn't very exceptional (although fairly big). It could have been a great ad for the special purpose hardware approach, like graphics processors or something, but ibm isn't into that.

I'm sitting at 155# today. now i just have to stay there for a while. It should be easy since i can't go out to get food.

• May 19, 1997

"the bladerunner" was a book by alan nourse. william burroughs took the book and wrote "bladerunner (a movie)". ridley scott (director of the movie) got the rights to the title only. a bladerunner was someone who brought medical equipments to outlaw doctors. source:blade runner faq

I found a nanotech design web site that is part of an online project to design nanocomputers. I'm going to try to join them.

We always have a huge sunday dinner, and i usually gain 10 pounds and it takes a week to lose it all back. But this tie i restrained myself a little, and i'm back at 156# (i was down to 154# yesterday). I've also started making ice cubes out of lemonade as a snack, which is a whole lot fewer calories than actually drinking two quarts of lemonade.

i want to expand on the importance of cult leaders being bold confusing heretical andoversimplified. These are things that often get people to believe stuff they wouldn't easily believe. Being bold is pretty obvious, since some people will empathize with someone's apparently strong belief in an idea just by wanting to share the emotion and some people really envy the sureness, the lack of uncertainty. Being confusing is surprisingly convincing, because some people connect things that are hard to understand with things that must be right, some twisted kind of judgement thing that works surprisingly well when mixed with a blod approach, also there is kind of an elitist field to it, i understand (i think) and you can't, so nyahh. Heretical statements, which aren't accepted by most people, also have that elitist idea, but in addition there is the righteous indignation from a feeling of persecution; i suffer therefore i must be right. Being oversimplified has a completely different attraction; people feel a great joy when everything seems to fall in place, even if that requires ignoring large bits of facts, a great peace sits with them.

• May 18, 1997

I was reading that mind is artificial. Most science is about discovering how things are, but with the mind, it is much more a matter of what can be created. Design and development are more important than discovery and explanation in things relating to the mind.

Metaphors used to describe the mind tend to follow the structure of the society, simply because they have to be understandable. Freud's was the struggle between the wild commoners, the aristocracy and the middle class. For a long time we had top down models, The owners or government telling everyone what to do. Right now we have heavily interactionist models, like the independent countries or companies.

I really want to get an HP 320LX Palmtop computer. my hp95lx is getting long in the tooth, and i'd like to have a windows ce box, and maybe develop if i get ambitious.

i looked at a different kind of search tool MetaCrawler. It calls other search engines and integrates the results. I think it's supposed to get more relevant hits, but i haven't used it enough. It didn't find what's-her-name, though.

I saw an ok page at eclectic artistry It's mostly just artsy. But it gots some awards, and i checked out out one group, webnet webratings. All the ones they liked were godawfully slow, and mostly i didn't wait for them to load, because there didn't seem to be anything intersting on them. My tastes are very far from those guys.

I wrote a message to Suck suggesting that they break their long table up, so people could start reading before it was fully loaded (something i do here). But they aren't really into being nice.

• May 17, 1997

I keep thinking of stuff i would say to people, but it's people i will probably never see again, and i would never say it anyway.

A good cult leader must be (things that make people believe in him) bold, confusing, heretical, oversimple.

Philosophy is kind of a social club, with people trying to pat each other on the back and get approval.

It is a hot day. i really need to go down to the beach.

I tend to try things out to see what will happen. And i guess you can call that experimental, but it isn't scientific. Scientific is when you have a theory and you do something to check it. I really need to try to be more scientific, but i guess i'm mostly just empirical.

Some stuff about the future. People will stay people, and they will want to do things that make a difference. If machines will do a lot of the physical labor, people will still want to feel in charge of the machines. People will always want to think of the machines as doing what they want. And probably there will still being a lot of people serving other people, not so much as that is necessary but because it's what people want. People always try to be dominating or competive or helpful or obedient. Making up stuff tends to be suitable for a lot of people, but some people just like to be told what to do and are happy to do it and let others do the worrying. Its likely that machines will be able to do all these things, but there is probably little reason for them to be competitive. The probably for the future, again, is that we are emotionally set up for the hard life of the savannah and poorly adapted for what the future will be like. We are looking at machine that can do a lot of our repetitive thinking tasks for us, leaving us to new things all the time, with faster and faster change, but we don't like all that change, so we need to find stability. We get a lot of reactions against technology and change now, but there will be important attempt to put real human touches into the machines.

• May 16, 1997

[#phil] i want a dentist with a hygenist that wears a dominatrix uniform. spit, you miserable dog! vee haff vays of making you floss. pain can be a good thing.

I started work on an index. It looks like its going to take some time. I'm still working on the format. Mostly i'm going through all this stuff paragraph by paragraph and giving a one word entry. I've decided not to put names of things as separate entries, but to have major groupings like people and movies. I'm hoping that there will be some topics that get repeated, and i may have to watch for synonyms. Maybe something like the yellow pages with a lot of see alsos. With luck it won't be too bad, And i should be able to update it daily with the main journal.

Somebody on irc actually messaged my with something from this journal, and said they liked the "sight". That was pretty nice.

Yesterday was actually a pretty good day, i got a lot done, i excercised on the rower, i changed the distributor cap and rotor on my car, i fixed a bad switch on my reading lamp, i trimmed the overgrown bushes, i sent out my transcript and a a resume to that place, i finally got an interview with some people to get assistance looking for a job, i got wynne's pager number, started the journal index. Something i didn't get done, i wanted to practice some inline skating since i'm not stable enough to skate in public yet, but there aren't and sidewalks and i'm on a gravelly road. There is a small walk beside the house which is usually covered with leaves that i have cleared off, so now i can do that, but i just couldn't fit it in (actually i was thinking i might page wynne if i finished out my list, so that may have done something to it).

It wasn't such a good day for my brother freddie. He slid off the big mountain road [Bear Creek] around here and got stuck on the edge. It had to be all the way at the top, too. Everything was ok except a tire that had to be replaced.

• May 15, 1997

I got my transcript from memphis state, and i decided to put it on the web. There was one AI company that asked me for it, although that's been almost a month, but even though i had never even seen it myself, i decided to actually get it and send it to them. In fact, i still have my last couple of report cards unopened that i was saving for some special moment, but now the surprise is ruined. I do still have the unopened report card from some extension classes, but those really don't matter. Oh well. The transcript shows the C that i got (and that was lucky) in organic chemistry, which messed up my med school plans. Sure, i could take it again, but it really made me question if it was really right for me (and i already had some concerns), something to show me that i wasn't as smart as i thought.

• May 14, 1997

"Life goes on." (Beatles Anthology 3)

Habits are funny, in that the reasons for whatever you were doing can be gone, but you still have the habit of doing it. There is a process of deciding to do something, but after a while, you create something new in your head that bypasses the work for the decision, and just goes on and does the old thing. To change a habit, you have to get rid of the old reasons, so you don't fall back on them, and you have to add yet another "habit" to bypass the first habit. The old habit doesn't go away, it just gets bypassed by the new one.

"With every mistake we must surely be learning. Still my guitar gently weeps."
"As i'm sitting here, doing nothing but aging"

Some guys from 212 said they liked my site, and i should add a link on their site to mine. But anyone can do that, and i did want to be just another in a big bunch. But i thought that was nice at least that they took the time. Too self-absorbed. Augh.

Women want to be understood, especially their feelings. maybe that's why they like to chatter.

So maybe procrastination is bad after all.

• May 13, 1997

We almost have automatic driving machines for cars. That could mean fewer traffic deaths, no drunk driving, maybe a little more productivity and free time for people. maybe shared cars will come back. Will we have cars driving without passengers?

I'm over my head!

May 12, 1997 Little miss strange.

Today is not a good day.

Electric Ladyland (if you couldn't tell)

what i need to do is make an index of all this stuff, because there is just way too much, and nobody's gonna be looking at all of it.

At least i can cry.

It's too bad our friends can't be with us today.

Hmm, something to think about. A loss is going to hurt. something is going to have to happen to the pain over time, unless you ignore it somehow, in which case it will stay just like you left it. Intellectualizing about it is a way of ignoring it, as is doing something else, or being distracted, or finding substitutes. The pain will wait for you, but we you confront it, when you talk to it, it will tell you things about yourself--what you want, what you had, what is good about the world. I don't know what makes it eventually possible to deal with it. Maybe it could be some gradual forgetting process, a learning that this feeling is just less and less of a value, not in an intellectual way of course, that part of the mind really isn't involved with the actual feeling although it can distract you from it. I have noticed that some feelings just become less as you stare at them. Maybe its something like that. Just forgetting the feeling of loss i guess is the real deal.

About forgetting. Sometimes there are indicators that you give to yourself that you don't need to remember something, like i write down things to forget. There is a computer thing where you've written stuff out but from a computer glitch you lose what you have just down, and its hard to get all that back because you have forgetten your whole thought process you used to write it, that is, not just the words, but all the reasons why you chose those things. Another thing that's personal to me in deciding what to forget, is that i don't care for any details about things, i'm only out for the big picture. I have noticed that there are a lot of people that seem really into the details, and the remember stuff i would never care about. So it really is a matter of what you care about and think important or what you feel you should remember. Maybe i should attack my goals a little harder.

• May 11, 1997

Big Blue wins! it beats kasparov in the chess match!

I went out with cliff and eric to see trout fishing in america, a two person band (bass and guitar). They were good musicians, but were in-your-face breeders who even had children's songs. But still, i'm thinking i might breakdown and get a keyboard, and maybe play some guitar again. There is something about the interaction between players that is really cool. I have lots of dreams, and one of them is to play a competent trio, but the only way you really get good is by actually working and playing all the time, and i'm not so into that. One thig that would really be cool would be to design an intelligent system with music appreciation ability. Cliff was talking about how interesting the experience of time was in relation to music as a sequence of notes.

In the economist there's the view that maybe big blue vs Kasparov is really unimportant, and that chess is really a trivial problem. I mean computers can add fast too (and do symbolic calculus), but that doesn't make them intelligent. I've held this view for a long time. The whole chess machine approach just isn't much like real ai. It is not about thinking.

I found something about education, talking to them. When education is done poorly it is just a memorization of facts. History can be taught like that, but for me history was understanding why things happened, and english is about understanding how people feel (i never could get english, i was of the mind set then 'just tell me what i need to know and i'll learn it'). The thing that really bothers me is physics, which in high school is a waste. Newton, mr. physics, invented and used calculus. In this understanding we see how all things obey pretty much one rule, not a whole bunch of different rules, which are just consequences. Its like in history studying only the results and not the reasons. But i understand that some people just see the world as a bunch of unrelated and arbitrary interactions, and you can get some short term predictive understanding with modeling the world as objects, But a linear models (where two things together have the same effect as if they had done there things seperately and you just put the results together) don't work so we as you move further away from what you know. People build up a lot of rules of thumb to understand people, a different way of looking.

i saw siskel and ebert's review of 5th element. two thumbs up. They pointed out something i don't usually think about--art direction. It's visually quite excellent, and gene actually mentioned it should get a oscar nomimnation for costume design. It really is good looking.

• May 10, 1997

I got a message from SF Mensa web guy that somebody had contacted them through my page! cool, probably IRC people. He offered to add me to their links. bonus.

Comfort level must have something to do with skin temperature in relation to room temperature, which isn't the same for everyone. I more sophisticated climate control would measure skin temperature and adjust according to that. Just being able to measure it would be handy for various reasons, with something like thermal imaging.

You don't decide what you want, and it really isn't born with you. You learn what you want by seeing how the world, or the things in it, makes you feel. It isn't instinct but it is intuitive, which is to say you aren't aware directly how you come to want things, although you can figure it out. But there is a built-in system for connecting things together into complex wants, and it's a kind of sublingual learning from experience that we don't have much access to.

I just finished putting in a garden, although i plan to put some more stuff in, so maybe it isn't quite finished. I have three tomato plants and a pepper plant, i put down some squash seeds, but its a little late to grow from seed and i'll probably get some squash plants. I planted some herbs from seed, dill and basil mostly. Last year i tried to grow them in a planter, but the planter couldn't hold water properly and nothing grew, although i did get a lot of sprouts. I want to get some parsley seeds. I remember i use to pick parsley that my mom grew, she had some in the garden, but she also had some growing in a cut-out barrel. I think the potato i planted has died off, but i planted a big onion that had sprouted but was turning yellow from sitting inside waiting for me to get my act together. There is an overgrown area by the grape vines and next to the squash bed that i want to clear and plant with sunflowers, if i feel ambitious. There are some old asparagus plants that i think i should pull up, or maybe just some of them.

I had a dream about moving into a house with ghosts, but i wasn't afraid of them. It seems to me ghosts are just mental symbols of fears. So i took this as a good sign.

There was a sliders episode about vampires. When i was a kid, i used to read about vampires and werewolves and witches and things like that. The point about the stake through the heart of a vampire is that it is a stake, and not just a pointy piece of wood, that is, it's supposed to stick in the ground and keep them from getting up. Anyway, one time i asked wynne to tell me something interesting, and she told about how there is a disease that makes people sensitive to light and they need to drink blood. She is just too good. I only wish i could hve been nicer to her.

Why do i even need to go see her? I could just call and talk, but that's a little impersonal, and i would like to see her. *sigh*

I'm building this list of questions for wynne if i ever talk to her (still pretty iffy): how do you feel about (various things) (i'm more of a 'what do you think about ...' person); what was wrong with me (a guy likes to know); how did med school change you (she mentioned something about this before, and i'd like to hear the after); What goals do you have now; why did you end up at Stanford; where do want to end up; how did it work out with your first love; what was the deal with mike woodbury; what is your myers-briggs personality type (she probably is not interested in that stuff, some people hate labeling); you asked me if people could change, who were you talking about (i didn't want to know at the time); and more i'm sure.

• May 9, 1997

The significance to me is that i never kissed wynne (i guess i never saw her when she was asleep), though maybe i should have. I actually made efforts not to try to act that way towards her because i really just wanted to be friends (i was kidding myself about the "just" part, but life's tough). So i tried to avoid anything that might look like a date, and i avoided anything to do with food because that has very basic courtship meaning. I don't regret it (I'm pretty sure), except that now i wonder maybe she might not have appreciated it. i was just too cold back then.

And it made me think about kissing. I don't know why i got out of that habit, maybe it was those years without any girls around at all. I don't have any trouble kissing even women i don't even know, it's not that big a deal to me. When i was very little, before kindergarten, i was actually a pretty friendly kid, not that i can remember back that far, but my mom used to babysit for people alot and i would always have kids around. There was one little girl, that i know i loved, Stacy Guster, and her sister Kimberly. I can't really remember anything else except the feeling, but i used to kiss her and was generally affectionate. But i moved away. I was too young to understand it, and i was pretty shy after that. (Maybe it was more a matter of not knowing how to make friends since they had just been there). I learned that Stacy died at 17 in a car accident, and for someone i could hardly remember, felt pretty sad about it. They had a brother chris who was born on my birthday.

So i ended up just a loner. in 5th and six grade there was a girl named Ashley Boggs who i guess i had something of a crush on, used to call her centipede. I almost continued to go to school with her, but i switched to a private school. I know someone called me wondering where i was, and it might have been her. i almost forgot about her like all the others from then (except donald crisp). Anyway, I was at Dairy Queen in the Mall of Memphis, she was working there and i remembered the name on her tag. I didn't say anything, of course, that's just me. And then later, i find out she's working out at a bar called Huey's east, a manager actually, and her dad owns the place. The place is close to me so i went there a lot. I was sitting there once when she was there, and i was trying to think of something to say, but i couldn't see any reason to talk to her. It was strange, i would sit there thinking i should say something but having nothing to say.

I had a weird feeling. I felt i could just call wynne up and it would be no big deal. I think it was after relieving some of the tension about thinking i "just" wanted to be friends. It was a strange kind of mirage.

a moment of clarity is worth a thousand prayers.

I think we need to burn all the CO2 in the ground and make the planet warmer. Warmer is better, life evolved with all the CO2 in the air and it was a lot warmer, and more CO2 would make plants grow better, as would just being warmer. Of course people might have to wear less clothing. Bring on the greenhouse!

• May 8, 1997

Education is required by the goverment. Well, at least they require kids to go to school, which could just be warehousing, and it costs money. Prisons really should be about the same thing, educating people to be productive, although they tend to just be about warehousing. And it really is just an extension of the original government mandate to educate, not just a special way of dealing wiht problems. Assuming of course that crimes aren't actually the best solution for some people, they need to have some ability to pursue happiness, and society needs to find ways to be successful that don't need lots of money, or that are accessible to everyone. Problems are failures in the search for happiness. Most crimes could be merely debts that need to be repaid. Murder would be tough on that one, and some people don't perceive value clearly. The question of "victimless" crime is tough, because it needs to be shown who is actually losing how much by them. And it could become something like a tax.

I like myself. a lot, even. i just think i like her better

i am spending way too much time writing.

I don't call it loyalty to go off and kill people. If you want to kill them, nuke them. I'd give clinton a medal for not going to that stupid police-action.

The existence of time in this universe is contingent upon certain of its properties.

Tabitha Soren, MTV news person, has a scholarship ($44k) to study at Stanford.

• May 7, 1997

[sci.philosophy.meta] eventually we will probably be able to study and create new universes, which will take a great deal more understanding.

[spm] ok, time, hmm. First we have to assert that time is roughly equivalent to distance. We no longer have objects at locations, but trajectories in space-time. Mechanical laws need to be formulated in terms of these trajectories, eg inertia is a rrequirement that trajectories be straight, and forces are a temporally sliced description of the interaction of trajectories. These trajectories have various properties, electrical, gavitational, that influence the interactions in various ways to form temporal patterns. General relativity describes gravitation trajectory effects./
All this still leaves out the fundamental questions of what distances and time differences are and how space-time is able to create them or allow their existence. This may just be a product of the certain types of interactions possible in this universe, and our perception of them may be a consequence of the anthropic principle.

[spm]what is an understanding but a description? We can only know things by holding models of them. There are nothing but descriptions, but i suppose the real goal is to find a description in terms of things that can be controlled and changed to satisfy some desire./ What does 'why' mean, anyway? Are we asking what came before, to try to find more fundamental principles, and maybe control the development of the event or thing? The act of looking deeper may simply be a projection into a different logical space. / Some people like to understand the world in terms of simple powerful principles, but really there are a multitude of interactions that each have there own properties and classifications.

Life is tough. pound it with a mallet.

Some things to do when i get away from the relatives: take the passenger seat out of the car, shave my head, get a girlfriend, .new clothes.

i have this feeling sometimes like she is really the only other person out there, all the rest are just shadows. It was especially like that in her presence.

Maybe i will just encode things.

for some reason it bothers me that she spent a year in england. I don't know if i'm just jealous, i mean everybody does stuff that i couldn't do, but maybe for everyone else i can feel better because i can at least think i'm a little smarter than them. But she's smarter than me and luckier and people do stuff for her. People do stuff to me. The only relevant one. and a girl, too. People get together in gangs and do things. It may have bothered me somewhat as just envy, and me feeling sorry for myself, but there is also the whole dislike of humanity thing. I developed a kind of dislike for touristy, temporary vacation things. I really don't care to do anything just so i can have a memory of it (I mean who cares what i remember?). I prefer to simply be where i am, and forget the past. There is also the missed chances to go to germany which this contributed to.

Any system of beliefs is bound to have contradictions, at least in the implications of those beliefs. The most important part of rationality is that those unavoidable contradictions can be detected and dealt with. Since they cannot be completely eliminated, mostly they will need to be ignored while trying to maintain some measured minimal level of conflict. It isn't possible to detect external truth, only to measure the level of contradiction in our belief system.

It's getting to the point were i'm not sure there actually is such a thing as my true feelings on certain issues. There are only various reconstructions.

And then there was that whole girls are bad thing. So they take away the girls, and the logical thing to learn from this is that girls are bad. And there are some sort of cultural things to that effect, at least that they are inferior. Imagine my surprise! so if it wasn't them, it must have been me. i was bad.

• May 3, 1997

if you ask a question you can't answer, ask a different question

[#phil]when is a good time to give up on your dreams? what i mean is, there are such things as targets of opportunity, that you pursue when convenient, but normally just sit around waiting for the opportunity without any real effort at all. the choice to terminate an active pursuit is interesting, but a different question from what i am looking at right now. there still are problems in keeping a lot of dreams in the waiting, it is still something of a cognitive/emotional load.

That does bring out the whole issue of when to actively pursue goals, which is the more traditional question, and which is more open to utilitarian analysis. it is in the hunting nature to chase after things when you think you can catch them. It is also possible to make efforts and devices, traps, to catch them. The whole goal pursuit issue is quite complex, even at the level of actions in the world. But it is also an interesting question simply at the level of cognition. Achieving goals is the essence of intelligence. How is a dream encoded. there must be some type of modeling and simulation, and while new events are detected, there must be some way of making comparisons to discover if we are approaching something critical to a particular goal. It must be that we have various scenarios for capture of the target, and that we can quickly recognize similarities to any of the scenes in these scenarios. This comparison mechanism is obviously pretty tricky, and a question is how much fitting in can be done dynamically, as opposed to static storage of lots of scenes for comparison. Even the storage process will need to use hierarchical and abstract prepresenations. Since the interpretations go into the memories from the beginning, the learning process is very critical to functioning, not simply as a big collection of data, but more as a predetermination of all future interpretation because all interpretation is a relation to previously understood scenarios. It is to be expected that such an inherently chaotic (sensitive to initial conditions) approach to development would create tremendous diversity in the final mental systems, limited of course by the constraints imposed on by the environment, such as limits on what can be learned.

[tpm] There is something in the world that creates stable separations of whatevers in time. Just as there is something creating similar stable separations in various directions. What it means for these properties (distance and duration) to be fundamental, for us to be able only to recognize that they exist and not why they exist, is that we simply do not fully understand them.

What's the deal with intelligent dinosaurs? some were on st:ds9, and sliders had some

• May 2, 1997

Looking at the dawkins stuff in dennett and his critics, it seems to me that computer virus isn't necessarily the best term, because computer code really isn't a lot like DNA. DNA gives instructions to build proteins which do work by altering chemical processes. Computer code is a lot like the actual proteins. If we ever have systems to generate programs on the fly, that stuff might be more like DNA. The problem is that the 'meme' idea isn't all that useful. Maybe the could be called computer prions.

The Loebner Prize was given out. It's something like the turing test, where the computer converses with the judges to fool them that its a person. More canned conversation to lead the converstation while ignoring most of what is said. I hope to submit something some time, but next year it's in australia.

i have reduced my home page to links that i use a lot, and moved links that seldom use to a separate page. I think this will give a clearer picture of me by showing the links i really use, and will reduce clutter, will make the main page faster, and it will fit in one screen. I found more space by making the file window display bars smaller. I now can feel a lot freer about adding links on the additional links page, since i don't care how big it gets, i'll probably add everything that i'll ever bookmark, which i wouldn't have done if it was all going on the home page. And i did add a few more links on both pages. I'm not obsessing over personality types as much, but i still want to work some more on the various outlooks. I think it somewhat better now.

• May 1, 1997

I went down there really to get the new jimi hendrix album First Rays of the New Rising Sun, which i am listening to. The didn't have it at the bookstore there, so i had to pick it up later at Frye's. its mostly just stuff from cry of love but it does have a version of "hey baby, land of the new rising sun", which i haven't heard before (i don't know what it's on) it's a little stranger than the non-jimi version i have, and i need to get used to it.

The other thing i wanted from Stanford was to see the textbook for the classes on medical information systems. They actual do some AI stuff for diagnosis, which i heard about in my logic programming class. I'm thinking of trying to take one of those classes. I never even considered med info sys, but i did always want to work on ai programs form medicine, which is why i wanted to go to medical school. But most of that stuff is more mundane that i wouldn't care about. Still, the one sequence of like 3 classes seems interesting. I think i'll try to email the guy. I wrote to memphis state to send me a transcript. (actually an ai company asked me for it).

when i go down to stanford i usually get a gatorade from the little store there. i changed to orange juice, though, which for me has a more spiritual quality. I think of it as sun juice. The gatorade was more of a thirst quencher. Orange juice is more like a meal. nurturing, like

There really isn't much use in having a picture phone to see the face of the person talking. What it really should be is a way to show people things. That is the transmitting phone camera should point away from the person, not at him, so the two people can share and experience the way they share the conversation. and it's going to need the eyepiece anyway to look at.

Real romantics love sincerity, and they hate maudlin sentimentality.

slow today. I think yesterday was just a bad day.