David II
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
util's LiveJournal:
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| Saturday, April 17th, 2021 | | 12:11 pm |
| | Wednesday, January 11th, 2017 | | 3:09 am |
I, I, I
The ground carries a deep sound. A car out in the lot? A train further away? Do you become me now when you now read these words in your head? Or was I you? Self indulgent. Weird. Epithets that worry me when thinking of posting many thoughts on Facebook where they seem more in the face than here despite both places having feeds. Different understandings on the expectations of the audience. I should be sleeping. I will suffer later today when I wake and go to work. But I'm this moment rebelling against that responsibility and wondering at that rumble that vibrates the floor. By its having survived the limitations of its medium, of its means of communication, you can learn something about the subject, it seems. If morality can be taught, can be approximately understood, that tells you something, doesn't it? Same with everything else about us, communicated at practical speed over a noisy channel and running on limited hardware. But then again, so can quite elaborate programs be so transmitted so what limitations are there? If we're built to copy, then it seems memes are less interesting (but maybe more important??)? A quine in a language with a "copy program" instruction is not so interesting as one where more of the work has been left for the author of the quine by the author of the system. How many electric power companies is my laptop connected to now by its charger? There is no power plant in town that I know of so I guess the current is stretching across tens of miles of wire at least. 100 billion galaxies. 100 billion stars each. 10 sextillion stars? An underestimate? But so much space between them. So much space between the atoms in them and in the atoms too. Emptiness. Is there another world in our own made up of neutrinos, the inhabitants barely aware of ours, living on a timescale such that the Big Bang doesn't seem so long ago? No? Neutrino: "Observations of the cosmic microwave background suggest that neutrinos do not interact with themselves." "About 65 billion (6.5×10^10) solar neutrinos per second pass through every square centimeter perpendicular to the direction of the Sun in the region of the Earth." Wow. Not so empty? If something did interact strongly with them, it would have been destroyed or pushed away? I'll go to sleep still not knowing what that sound is. I send well wishes to all of you I knew before and everyone else too. Good night. | | Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012 | | 3:05 am |
I see the light of the screen on my knee. I see the lamp outside that'll be on all night through a crack in the shades. I hear them breathing sleeping. I hear it raining. Before that I heard the hiss of the sprinklers watering the wet grass. | | Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 | | 10:42 pm |
I hear the light humming besides my head. I see its fluorescent form dimly through the fiber of the paper and the grid of wood. The bumps on the wall cast a halo of shadows around it. Beside me is my wife. In the corner is a crib. | | Friday, February 3rd, 2012 | | 8:18 am |
| | Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011 | | 9:36 am |
For the time being, I'm moving most of my activities over to Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/117808384777851490555/posts I guess four has already gotten to most of you, but if you'd like an invite, just let me know how to get it to you. (I miss a lot of the formatting features from here as well as the community, but the recent service outage really annoyed me as do the ads.) Guess you've seen this elsewhere, but this looks pretty slick, eh: http://www.codecademy.com/Maybe I will try going here: http://www.uufs.org/home/Activities.phpAnyway, here are some words: The hobbled had a habit of tying down the birds. They'd wrap their wings in bubble gum and stuff their mouths with turds. Then the birds were hobbled and the hobbled had some birds. A woo, a roo, a kangaroo. The daisy's got some dander. The lazy've got a panda. If they feed her, they expand her. But they're lazy so she's a skinny not-a-bear. | | Wednesday, July 13th, 2011 | | 7:51 am |
| | Saturday, July 9th, 2011 | | 11:30 pm |
| | Sunday, July 3rd, 2011 | | 2:29 pm |
| | Wednesday, June 29th, 2011 | | 12:16 am |
| | Tuesday, June 28th, 2011 | | 8:49 am |
| | Monday, June 27th, 2011 | | 12:20 am |
| | Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011 | | 9:26 am |
| | Thursday, June 16th, 2011 | | 10:27 pm |
Just opened up my old laptop after several months of letting it sit idle in order to rescue my Skype credit. (Bastards.) I see a battery with an X: "No batteries available". :-( That BLUP is a Good Thing: The Estimation of Random Effects. This FTP site. CoffeeScript. Estimating Causal Effects from Large Data Sets Using Propensity Scores. --- Wow: JavaScript MP3 player. JavaScript PDF reader. Video of Brendan Eich and Jeremy Ashkenas. The Little Book on CoffeeScript. Male "biological clock". Two's complement of -1 = 1 1 ... 1 0 + 1 = 1 1 ... 1 ~ 11 ... 1 = 0 So, !!~'abc.indexOf('d') === false. Fun. CoffeeScript existential assignment operator: hash ?= {}. Love it. Not quite as in love with { a, b } = someObject. For some reason, it makes me uncomfortable to (I guess) use the names of the new variables on the left hand side also for matching on the object on the right. For example, what happens if I have?: [{a: {b}}, {a: {c}}] = xAh, from the translated source here, it looks like only the lowest level names get exposed as CoffeeScript variables. That seems the right thing to do. But then how about this case? [{a}, {a}] = xThat is, try to get the 'a' field from the two objects in array x. I wonder if people would find the following syntax nice (if some alternative is not already there): [{a1=a}, {a2=a}]That is, imagine evaluating the assignment operation within the context described by the pattern. Understanding V8--- If you consume a diuretic (and I guess some commonly ingested items are to some degree), does that make pee color a less accurate indicator of whether you're dehydrated or not? Is headache commonly correlated with having toxins in the blood that may be stressing your liver already? Does this suggest being careful about taking pain relievers for headache relief if they also stress the liver? What happens if you give someone a caffeine/amphetamine drip while they're sleeping? | | Wednesday, June 15th, 2011 | | 10:24 pm |
| | Sunday, June 12th, 2011 | | 10:45 am |
This thread Ten things I didn’t know about MongoDB gives me a less positive impression of MongoDB. Rich Hickey: "I read relentlessly. I don’t do any programming not directed at making the computer do something useful, so I don’t do any exercises. I try to spend more time thinking about the problem than I do typing it in." (No exercises = no toy programs?) Clojure Bookshelf. Hal Abelson. (What do you think of the idea of encouraging students to think about finding interesting, worthwhile problems as part of the course?) Hadley Wickham. Advanced R development. Software for Data Analysis: Programming with R. Curry–Howard correspondence. Unboxed union types in Scala via the Curry-Howard isomorphism. HN. Evaluating Text Extraction Algorithms (Interesting. Small thing: seems if any largely non-ASCII docs, eg, Chinese, were included, this could add some bias (bump up everyone's score up) since the cleaning step would leave them basically empty, ie, pretty easy to get right. What do you think of the 3D bar charts?) Two Dogmas of Empiricism. The Intelligent Investor (Out of date?) Python progression path - From apprentice to guru. APL FAQ. Nial Open Source Project (follows in the path of APL). Michael Friendly: Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualization. The Joy of Concatenative Languages Part 1. The Joy of Concatenative Languages Part 2: Innately Functional. The Joy of Concatenative Languages Part 3: Kindly Types. The Cat Programming Language. ADVANCED COMPUTER SCIENCE COURSES. | | 1:16 am |
| | Saturday, June 11th, 2011 | | 5:24 pm |
Subsidize this
I get e-mailings from Senator Grassley occasionally. Today I got another. The following sections seemed somewhat at odds. Keeping Integrity in the Farm Program
This week I introduced bipartisan legislation that would put a hard cap and other safeguards on payments farmers can receive from the federal farm program. The goal is to preserve the safety net that is so important for agriculture and, in turn, the abundant and affordable food supply the rest of us depend on. and Free Trade Should be Fair Trade
International trade opens new markets for U.S. products and supports good-paying jobs in the United States. Likewise, international trade presents goods and services to U.S. employers and consumers that fuel commerce and choice. I push for new trade agreements, like the pending agreements with Korea, Colombia, and Panama, to present new opportunities for U.S. farmers, manufacturers, and the services industry, including energy, financial and insurance firms. Trade is supposed to be a two-way street. But sometimes a U.S. company is harmed by the improper actions of trade partners under international rules. A company based in another country might flood the U.S. market with products that are unfairly subsidized by their governments. (I think it's a lie that much of the US farm programs aim at making food more affordable and abundant, and I think Grassley knows that it's a lie. But ignoring that, is this not displaying either incredible hypocrisy or incredible lack of perspective?) ... Out walking this morning, I saw grass still wet from the sprinklers the night before. The water in the pond with the ducks and geese was blue green as ever. A tulip tree flower lay on the ground. I picked it up and brought it home. | | Sunday, June 5th, 2011 | | 11:59 pm |
| | 10:33 am |
Exploratory model analysis with R and GGobi [PDF]: "Firstly, the t scores for infant mortality are very similar over all models. This indicates that this variable is largely independent of the other explanatory variables." (What's a real world situation if any where you might expect this to be misleading?) Selecting Amongst Large Classes of Models [PDF]. (Makes me think of the cross validation article.) Please don't delete your old stuff. An Executable Semantics For C Is Useful. c-semantics. Ask HN: Do Americans stand a chance on freelance sites?. (People say "yes".) Xavier Leroy. Integration by integration under the integral sign. Integration by differentiation of parameter. (I finally encountered the latter in a grad school stat class.) Reading Code From Top to Bottom by Tom Duff. ( HN) (Avoid deep nesting for better readability.) Shareware Amateurs vs. Shareware Professionals. esoteric R: introducing closures. Does function itself not create a closure?
f <- (function() {
x <- 3
return(function(y) x * y)
})()
> do.call(f, list(y=1:10))
[1] 3 6 9 12 15 18 21 24 27 30Seems we can abstract out an "addMethod" function: addMethod <- function(env, name, func) {
# Since env is assumed to be an environment,
# would it add anything to instead assign
# as.environment(env)?
environment(func) <- env
env[[name]] <- func
}
queue <- function() {
e <- new.env(hash=TRUE)
e$.queue <- NULL
addMethod(e, "push", function(x) {
.queue <<- c(.queue, x)
return(invisible(x))
})
addMethod(e, "pop", function() {
val <- .queue[1]
.queue <<- .queue[-1]
return(val)
})
return(e)
}(One problem with this: every queue instance gets its own copies of the functions.) |
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