brainstorms

Monday December 19, 2005

short notes

short notes can take longer to write than long notes.

eight or ten years ago, i wrote a little awk script to clean-up my ietf announcements folder so it only contains the last message related to the last edition of any one draft. [eg. the message announcing the latest draft-perlman-rbridge-03.txt is kept, earlier messages announcing rbridge-02.txt and rbridge-01.txt are removed.] i just found out this still works, partly because i still keep all my messages in mh folders, therefore exposed to all unix commands and scripting languages trivially. [someone should hack mh folder support to thunderbird, so it can actually lift off for me]

flushing various books to friends and libraries, if they take them: chalmers volume on consciousness [no interest in the new mysterians], kaplan's biography of mark twain [i have the very good ron powers biography], an earlier edition of zinsser on writing well [i have too many books on writing, very few that actually help]. i am tempted to give away joel on software as well, but there is just enough interesting bits to make me keep it a little while longer for a closer read.

randomly opened jackson's software requirements and specifications and i am at page 39: critical reading:

it is all too easy to let your eyes gently move over a text or diagram, enjoying an undemanding intellectual comfort that is readily mistaken for accurate understanding. in software development, reading must be active critical inquiry, not passive acceptance.

[this book is simply brilliant; one of the few books i have a copy of at work and at home.]

incoming [on order] in the near future: dan dennett breaking the spell, judith r. harris no two alike, vernor vinge's rainbows end, lee child the hard way mauro and mcdougall solaris internals (2nd ed), blandine laperche, John Kenneth Galbraith And the Future of Economics, charlie stross clan corporate.

i was hoping for a new edition of clute's essential encyclopedia of science fiction. instead, there is westfahl's substantial (and expensive) three-volume The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders. now if i only had a larger house...

barnes and noble evidently cannot keep up with books scheduled to be published in the near future. i try to use b&n links in this blog, but i gave up for some of the links above. as always, amazon is successfully forward and wide, even if drooling and obnoxious. [that will take another blog entry...]

my good friend crankshaft the-half-orc recently said: I've come to the conclusion that I am a fully functional psychopath, just one with socially acceptable habits.

usda's new food guide pyramid may well be a textbook example of how to mislead with bad information graphics. it is grade A phluff (tufte's term for the cognitive style of powerpoint, appropriate here): unlike the earlier pyramid, this structure has no semantic value; it merely cloaks itself in the authority of its predecessor. narrow triangular strips have one virtue, if it can be called that: they are visually consistent with the banal guidelines attached to each group; slight differences in their width are visually lightweight and vague. in printed form, what used to be six or eight pages of interesting reading is now two pages of phluff: be happy, think and know less, eat more. a remarkable disservice to health and intellect.

ipod: martin shuffle

peter norvig has a very neat discussion of locating songs within an ipod shuffle. It outlines his friend charles martin's solution using sorted playlists with sequential and shuffle mode stepping. also included: markov decision processes, value iteration algorithm, and python code. [phew]