brainstorms

Wednesday August 31, 2005

statistically interesting phrases...

have to love amazon: a click-rotten poster child of the times, it can at once be amazing and aggressively inane. its pedestrian statistically improbable phrase [improbable where] extractor has thus far produced more chuckles for me than insight. some random selections [excluding meaningless phrases]:

Common Sense, Science and Scepticism : A Historical Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge

ideally rational inquirer, hallucinate pink rats, coin from the side, biggest prime number, see pink rats, straight oar, evil genius hypothesis, empirical basis for knowledge, rationalist alternative, reductio proof, sceptical objection, criterion philosophy, inductive validity, infinite regress argument, unobserved cases, sceptical worries, rationalist dream, conjectural knowledge

darwin's dangerous idea

constant speedism, tossing tournament, artifact hermeneutics, awful stretcher, greedy reductionism, amber strings, pervasive adaptation, adaptationist reasoning, adaptationist thinking, universal acid, somatic line, mindless purposeless forces, real intentionality, habitat tracking, original intentionality, hidden constraints, feasible algorithm, biological possibility, typographical change, human mathematicians, adaptationist explanation, daughter species, language organ

dark age ahead

cultural winners, mass amnesia, scientific state, fiscal accountability, assisted housing, fruitful question

consciousness explained

electrochemical happenings, pinkish glowing ring, hysterically blind people, spatial referral, phenomenological items, heterophenomenological worlds, color phi, discriminative states, epistemic hunger, neuronal adequacy, meme vehicles, reactive dispositions, intervening motion, blindsight subjects, imagined cow, strong hallucinations, preverbal message, inverted qualia, conscious robot, subjective sequence, virtus dormitiva, phenomenal space, user illusion, belief environment, absolute timing

peace war

bobble generators, bobble burst, been bobbled, sortie craft, banana wagons, recon satellites, satellite net, four thousand meters

cryptonomicon

grand wazir, substitution alphabet, data haven, hive mind, dive plan, making license plates, strange information, main vault, math whizzes

tunelessness in itunes

foiled again. i can load up my ipods directly from a mac in my home lab hosting a music library of several hundred CDs, but if that library is shared to our ibooks upstairs, no loads: shuffle playlist does not show the shared library, nor is it possible to drag-drop. [ok, so i can drag my ipod downstairs to the lab and drop it onto the library cradle.]

itunes will pass. music will remain.

Monday August 29, 2005

must have books for 2005/2006...

bill watterson, the complete calvin and hobbes
scott mccloud, making comics [see scott's blog]
frank miller's sin city library I
al aho, et al. 21st Century Compilers
charles stross, clan corporate [third book of The Merchant Princes trilogy]
daniel p. friedman, et al. reasoned schemer [oh well, once a schemer, always a schemer...]
grune and jacobs, parsing techniques (second edition)
meggs and purvis, meggs' history of graphic design, 4th edition
ellen lupton, diy - design it yourself
loeb and lee, batman absolute hush

[odds and ends: richard gabriel was promising to publish a collection of the early MIT lambda papers by steele and others, but i have no idea of its status; if rpg or anyone who knows about that project is reading this, please let me know what is happening.]

stross: why input devices suck

charlie's insightful overview of ways of shoveling data into computers, and why they all suck.

recent good quotes

everything considered, nothing in human history compares with the magnificence of science's achievements, or the power and truth of its methods. -- a. c. grayling

in the kingdom of the visually impaired, the partially-sighted person is fully empowered. -- george carlin [when will jesus bring the porkchops?]

math is unique in its ability to bamboozle a lay audience, which helps explain why creationists find it so appealing. --jason rosenhouse

the beauty of science is that it allows us to transcend our intuitions about the world, and it provides us with methods by which we can determine which of our intuitions are right and which are not. -- daniel gilbert

never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. -- margaret mead [found in david brin's blog]

i think the whole idea is daft. -- susan blackmore on zombies

mrs. young's law: science as we know it would not exist if it weren't for masking tape. -- matt young

only the generous survive. -- charles stross (accelerando)

Friday August 26, 2005

road to zen of design

zen of design has a charming slogan:

Challenge everything. Especially silly catch phrases.

there is the obvious self-reference, but i think the qualification stops the self-reference. some people would not consider challenge everything [for some fruitful range of everything] a silly catch phrase, especially in design. here is an exercise to put this in perspective: consider challenging these conventional wisdom bits extracted from paul graham's taste for makers or how you can make great things [i omitted the mind-numbingly boring bits like good design is redesign and so on]:

good design is simple

good design is timeless

good design is suggestive

good design is hard

good design looks easy

good design uses symmetry

good design resembles nature

good design is often strange

good design happens in chunks

[i will present my thoughts on these bits in another blog essay sometime soon.]

related reading: don gentner and jakob nielsen, the anti-mac interface, cacm aug 1996. [one of my favorite papers about challenging design assumptions]

Wednesday August 24, 2005

canon and the irresistible urge to switch...

hats off to canon. looks like canon 5d is a remarkable entry in the digital SLR realm. given its [speculated] price point, 12.8 mp specs and a full-size sensor, it will push many non-canon photographers [grind teeth] to the brink of tearing their hair out, selling or trading off their gear and do the switch.

yes, i really would like a full-size sensor dslr to use all existing 35mm lenses that fit, without having to worry about the field of view. even if i could afford the amazing nikon d2x [nearly twice the cost of canon 5d] its APS format chip is seriously annoying; here i have one of the finest wide-angle zooms ever made (af-s nikkor 17-35 f/2.8d) and all i can get out of it is a normal-to-near-normal field of view. couple that with nikon's aggressively myopic vision of their raw data format, and you can see the writing on the wall. [when one is hitting his head to that wall, writing is so much easier to see...]

i think i will start selling some of my nikon gear in order to get my first canon dslr, and a few good lenses, like the superb canon 100mm f/2.8 usm macro, likewise great canon 70~200 f/2.8 IS usm, and so on. i can probably keep some of the top-drawer nikon lenses around for the future, but one can only wait for nikon for so long.

sigh.

musical selection: jazz with prestige: a history of prestige jazz and blues [one of the best 4-cd collections i know]

[see also: michael Reichmann's [luminous landscape] informative commentary]

[updated: dpreview link is now pointing to a hands-on preview.]

[updated: yes there are some nebulous leaked specs for D200, to be announced within months. it looks good, but not good enough to stop me from switching part of my photography to canon 5d. c'est la vie.]

[updated: jan 2006. i did wait for nikon, mostly because of the cost of a switch. i now have a D200, well worth the wait. it is the best designed [d]slr i have ever used...]

Tuesday August 23, 2005

the mathemagician and pied puzzler

while looking up gardner, i found that the berlekamp/rodgers tribute volume is now available online. [the original hardcover is still available. an initial search for "mathemagician" had 91,864 hits, thanks to unwanted spelling correction.]

authors whose work i would buy sight unseen

here are the fifty authors whose [new] books i would order sight unseen. i saw geoff's (short) list recently and thought it was a good idea. [tum de dum. copy, paste, delete, delete, delete... lowcase. done. da dum. connie willis! sure. i had the pleasure to meet her at ad astra. one of the smartest people i have ever met. unbelievable.] so, this one is for geoff. [alas, i do not have my desert island list yet. it better be a big island.]

richard dawkins
daniel dennett
douglas hofstadter
susan haack
larry lessig
steven pinker
robert kirk
john allen paulos
jacques barzun
edward tufte

aaron elkins
allen steele
bruce sterling
charles stross
connie willis
david brin
greg egan
gregory benford
ian rankin
j. k. rowlings
jack mcdevitt
james lee burke
ken mcleod
lee child
lois mcmaster bujold
michael connelly
nancy kress
neal stephenson
paul j. mcauley
peter robinson
stanislav lem
stephen baxter
terry pratchett
vernor vinge
wil mccarthy
william gibson

freeman patterson
john shaw
ellen lupton
alex w. white

brian kernighan
rob pike
donald knuth
steve mcconnell
robert l. glass
jon bentley
marvin minsky
richard p. gabriel

mark bittman
jamie oliver

[note on lem: his 2003 dilemmas is yet to be translated. some translations of his earlier work have been criticised; it would be good to have better translations.]

[note on knuth: i do not really care for any of his religious output, so i guess in his case sight-unseen needs a qualifier: -in-math-or-computer-science.]

[others: i would have included john kenneth galbraith on the list as well, though i am not sure if he is working on any new books since turning 97. same for martin gardner. christopher alexander should be added too, but i do not have some of the earlier works published along with a pattern language. i have his later works. i was going to add alan musgrave to the list, but discovered i could not order his new book [essays on realism and rationalism] sight unseen, because i could not efford it. [if anyone knows of an effordable copy, please let me know] some philosophy books are very expensive alas. smullyan is out; last time i ordered one of his books sight unseen i ended up with a very strange little book about religious consciousness.]

[sight unseen: not quite literally. publishers try to re-sell old books in various innovative ways. for example, bittman's exceptional how to cook everything is now being sold as several softcover cookbooks, eg. basics, quick cooking etc. i usually detect this and avoid buying an old book in a new cover. i have pre-ordered his new international cookbook.]

[fifty: this list can easily be three times as long, but i trimmed it down, and kept it to essentials.]

music: brian eno, another day on earth, opal music. various, chess blues (1947-1967) [box set] chess/mca.

Monday August 22, 2005

dream world of dembski

mark perakh's paper the dream world of william dembski's creationism (skeptic v11#4) is now online.

First, as philosopher Dembski must know, if A entails B, B does not necessarily entail A. Even if his assertion (that the explanatory filter correctly infers design whenever an event is known to be caused by ID) were true, that fact in itself would not necessarily lead to the reverse conclusion (that each time explanatory filter attributes design, intelligence is indeed the causal antecedent of the observed event).

related links:
talk reason

Friday August 19, 2005

intelligent falling...

rotfl. the onion: evangelical scientists refute gravity with new 'intelligent falling' theory [thanks peter!]

related links:
creation and intelligent design watch
national center for science education

Thursday August 18, 2005

a sense of freedom

i had a hard time writing about this image. not quite sure why.

a couple of saturdays ago, eren and i went looking for harleys to make some pictures. i made about sixty images of harley abstracts, chromes, engine blocks. at the time, this adorned harley handlebar was just an attractive graphic in my viewfinder. i captured it in many different compositions, and moved on.

tonight, i finally get to process and organize my harley images. i open this image, and it stops me. i am pleased by the graphic, but i am really thinking about the depth of the simple act captured in this image. i think i find a sense of freedom in here not easily expressed in words.

[i went back to charlie stross's journal, and re-read his depressing entry on foreign travel and the related NYT story. what a disappointing contrast to the image i made.]

[this one is for my good friend duff caldewey]

Thursday August 11, 2005

quote of the day, about intelligent design

from paul r. gross's review of one of my favorite books, young and edis, Why Intelligent Design Fails, rutgers university press, 2004.

So it seems a trouble for busy scientists to give their time to truth-squads, examining (scrupulously, as do the WIDF contributors) the incessant nay-saying of creationists, and now of creationists who use the language of science and mathematics comfortably. But it must be done. There will be more anti-evolution, religiously motivated nay-saying, and there must be more books like WIDF. The stakes are high. Nothing less hangs in the balance than the hope that some fraction of the next generation of our children will get serious education in science, and that they will be capable of speaking truth not only to power, but to and for all their peers.

[made an exception and gave an amazon link this time, in case it helps sell additional copies of this superb book. it is not an easy read, but an important one.]

[black helicopter note: pratchett, stewart and cohen's humorous and enlightening science of discworld III: darwin's watch is still not available in the US. meanwhile, it can be ordered from canada.]

[image note: nearby storm drain cover, color coded.]

related site: fighting fashionable nonsense

[i have disabled further comments on this quote.]

itunes with freedb...

pinky, are you pondering what i am pondering?
narf, i think so brain, but how could i get itunes to work with freedb and still help you conquer the world?

i find the current itunes cddb customer lock repulsive but not unexpected from apple. also in keeping with this mode of business, gracenote (what a whopping misnomer) has dropped support for the original cddb1 protocol, which freedb also uses, and switched to a proprietary protocol. so the current dns workaround to use freedb instead of cddb no longer works. [interesting note from feurio about cddb2. also description and reference implementation of an alternative: compact disk metadata protocol]

i will be blunt. i never liked itunes. every passing day, i like it less, and wish for its eventual irrelevance like safari.

[addendum: geoff wondered if i am a mac user. my daily laptop is an ibook; all my photography and graphic work goes through macs. [see here and here for some notes] on the other hand, all software development is done on solaris, freebsd or netbsd, and sometimes on suse. i would disagree about browsers, but that will have to wait for another entry.]

Saturday August 06, 2005

american society of media photographers on raw formats

ASMP's short but cutting statement is worth reading.

[nikon did a great service to the world of photography by locking its raw format. now everyone is conscious of the raw problem, and seriously annoyed. nikon is the negative gradient lem's golem is referring to in its lectures. [stanislaw lem, imaginary magnitude]]