a blog about things that I've been thinking hard about

A bit like hash tags.

Actually, just like hash tags, but where each hash tag is a whole sentence.

This will then make it easy to find arguments against new propositions.

So here's my guess:

Life is dynamic

Life if subject to dissipative forces.

Life exists only as the result of the continuous prior existence of life.

The continued existence of life depends on thermodynamically irreversibe processes.

But many people have not heard of it

Those same people may be unwittingly contributing to Paywall Science

We need to ask: is this "Science"?

Or is it "Paywall Science"?

do I understand what the software does (or is supposed to do)?

do I understand how it does it?

do I believe that any bugs can easily be fixed?

have I done everything worth doing to answer "Yes" to the previous 3 questions?

knowledge can be either socialized or desocialized

various forces prevent the desocialization of organizational knowledge

those same forces are resisting your knowledge management initiatives

1. Sign up for Vimeo Plus, so you can upload 1280×720 HD videos.

2. Use SimpleScreenRecorder to record, at 1280×720 & 24 FPS.

3. Use Kdenlive to do simple editing and rendering.

4. Upload, tweak a couple of things, and let your audience watch ...

Write stdout to stdout. Without delay.

When you are finished, finish.

And if it crashes (or fails to parse), tell me what went wrong, and where.

The NZ government spends lots on supporting the Māori language.

I've listed all the online Māori language learning resources I could find.

There isn't that much there.

If the Māori language is something that matters, it needs to get online more.

Followed by a sequence of lines that expand on the ultra-short blurb.

Usually three or four lines. (Sometimes just two, no more than five.)

The lines form an indented sequence that encourages the reader to read them one at a time.

Canvas to draw the domain colouring

SVG to draw the graph of f on a circle, including the 3D "wiggle" effect

JQuery for the user interaction

JQuery UI for the sliders

The bigger the government software project, the more we should explore ways of doing it cheaper.

The more people who know the relevant details, the more chances to find cheaper ways.

In practice, the government prefers "need to know".

So kiss goodbye to all your tax dollars.

Every natural number has a factorization into primes.

Lemma: The product of any two non-multiples of a prime p must be a non-multiple of p.

Choose any prime from two distinct factorizations, and apply the lemma.

Rinse and repeat.

Twitter's patent (2007) describes a public messaging system with publishers and subscribers.

Miski (2001 or earlier) is the publicly published design for a public messaging system with publishers and subscribers.

Your password will include many strange hard-to-type characters.

You will be prevented from using your password manager to manage your account password.

You will be required to answer your security questions more often than you expect.

You can log in with Facebook, and we promise not abuse the Facebook privileges that we require you to give us.

Syncing video and audio is hard when they are recorded separately.

It's easy to sync the low quality audio from your camera with your separately recorded high quality audio.

After syncing the audios, make a note of the time offset.

Apply the time offset to the high quality audio before substituting it into the video.

Code comments are deemed necessary to help explain what the code is doing.

But sometimes it would have been better to have written the code better instead.

So what if we determined never to write comments?

We would then be forced to write the clearest possible code.

To achieve security, you need to know who and what to trust.

You need to have ways of seeing that someone or something is trustworthy.

But, computer systems require trust from so many different parties.

And what you see on your computer screen is a very tiny percentage of what is there.

README files are great.

We should put them everywhere.

Presumably every line of your code is there for some reason.

For any line of source code, you could describe, in a comment, what would happen if it wasn't there.

You could do that for every single line of code in your application.

The concept of God is a rather elusive concept, if it is not tied down to a specific set of religious doctrines.

In practice, atheists are not identified by a specific disbelief in a particular concept of God.

Rather, atheists are people who do not believe in the things that religious people believe in.

All other kinds of thinking are inexact.

If you go too far with inexact thinking, you will end up thinking something quite wrong.

With mathematics, you can go as far as you want to: the exactness keeps you safe.

Create the design in Inkscape (vector graphics application).

Export as a 16×16 pixel PNG file.

Open in Gimp, and save as "Microsoft Windows icon", with the name favicon.ico and details "32bpp, 8-bit alpha, no palette".

Upload favicon.icoto the root directory of your website.

Make sure the MIME type for .ico files is set to "image/x-icon".

Your customer signs up for Google Apps.

Your customer adds your application to their Google Apps.

Your customer adds their domain to the application as a new URL.

Your customer edits their own DNS to point their domain to ghs.google.com.

Source code quality matters, but it only happens if someone cares about it.

Developers are judged by the application functionality they produce, and not by the quality of their source code.

So, consider hiring someone whose job title is "Source Code Quality Controller".

Testing increases the value of ugly code.

This increase in value prevents the code from being refactored.

In a quantum multiverse life becomes certain even if the origin of life is extremely improbable.

An extreme level of improbability may be very sensitive to free parameters of the laws of physics.

If multiverses for all possible parameter choices exist (the "multi-multiverse"), we should exist in the one with least improbability of life originating.

If there is only one multiverse, with free parameters chosen, by "God", for whatever reason, then that value may not necessarily be the one with maximum likelihood.

If the observed likelihood is significantly lower than the maximum likelihood, then we can deduce that such a choice has been made (by "God").

If your application does multiple web requests sequentially, it may spend a lot of time waiting.

Thread-based concurrency is an easy way to do requests "in parallel", even on a single computer.

For example, doing multiple requests to Amazon's S3 using the Python Queue module.

It's owned by you.

It's controlled by you.

It says whatever you need to tell the world about your business.

It can be found when someone searches on Google for the name of your business.

Synaptic downscaling could represent offline calibration.

Perhaps the offline brain searches for hypothetical situations where synaptic activity requires calibration downwards.

These hypothetical situations would be dreams, made by the Dream Maker.

Record your .WAV files.

Possibly convert them to required format using SoX.

(The required format is signed integer, 16 bit, 44100 Hz sample rate, stereo.)

Burn the CD using InfraCorder.

Doing internet banking on a computer booted from a CD should be pretty secure.

But, no security system is foolproof.

There are at least nine ways it could go wrong.

Uncritical listening may play a significant role in worldview construction.

But, it is (obviously) vulnerable to manipulation.

So, it must occur in a secret manner which is kept hidden from both the speaker and the listener.

Application testing usually means testing functionality – things that should happen.

Security is about things that shouldn't happen.

So, testing security is not like testing functionality.

If your application needs to be secure, hire a specialist application security tester.

Secure booting, readonly sub-accounts, simple HTML interfaces for less powerful client computers

Optimise bootable CDs for usability

Optimise ISP service for bootable CDs

Ship a secure bootable CD with every computer sold

In some ways, books are better than tablets.

In other ways, tablets are better than books.

Why isn't there a tablet yet (in 2007) that we all want to buy?

There are things that only a select few can do.

And there are things that almost anyone can do.

Technological development keeps moving things from the first category to the second.

On the first day, God created the perfect exception ...

The voted web web has progressed, somewhat, from more centralised to less centralised.

Slashdot, then K5, then Digg, then CrispyNews (which didn't take off).

Also worth a mention, even though it's not specifically a "story site", Google.

As separate species, Neanderthals and modern humans would have avoided entering into sexual relations.

This avoidance would have manifested itself as mutually perceived "ugliness".

Now, in the present, we don't necessarily find Neanderthals so ugly, because it doesn't matter any more.

So Neanderthals probably used to appear even uglier than they appear to be today.

1. The grammar of the Domain-Specific Language (DSL)

2. The compiler to compile the DSL

3. Source code written in the DSL

4. Compiled code (as compiled by the compiler)

5. Support libraries for the compiled code

Most real-world programming is like solving a puzzle.

But some programmers see writing programs as a way of expressing meaning.

PrimeShooter^TM is a game where you shoot numbers with their prime factors.

All the game elements are HTML <div> elements.

Animation is done via CSS positional properties ("left" and "top").

The game loop is implemented using the Javascript function setinterval.

Some collision detection is required.

DRY = Don't Repeat Yourself.

But, repetition is most harmful when the repetition is inexact.

DRYDBERIOK = Don't Repeat Yourself Differently But Exact Repetition Is OK.
DRYDBERIOK = Don't Repeat Yourself Differently But Exact Repetition Is OK.

AganeAndAgane is a programming language that supports exact repetitionism.
AganeAndAgane is a programming language that supports exact repetitionism.
AganeAndAgane is a programming language that supports exact repetitionism.

A beneficial mutation is a decrease of entropy in a closed system.

Which is apparently prohibited by the Second Law.

But, very, very tiny decreases in entropy are permitted.

Which is exactly how evolution by natural selection happens.

People who play Tetris often dream about Tetris

I was once an enthusiastic bird-spotter, and I (still) sometimes dream about bird-spotting.

In these dreams I always dream that I see one or more birds that I don't recognize.

A tendency for certain things and not others to appear in our dreams might be telling us something about what dreams really are.

Traditional science excludes miracles altogether.

Quantum mechanics and thermodynamics make miracles possible, albeit unlikely.

The Multiverse makes such miracles likely to occur, at least in some universes.

The Weak Anthropic Principle tells us that the right sort of miracle can be observed.

We think of the Singularity as resulting in some kind of super-intelligence

But intelligence is a property of purposeful biological organisms.

And purpose results from reproduction and natural selection.

Is the Singularity going to reproduce?

Before you opened the box, information about the cat's state leaked out.

Even a tiny amount of "leakage" results in decoherence.

Decoherence results in correlation of wave functions.

The correlated cat is, relative to your own quantum state, either dead or alive.

Imagine a very large prime number P which is equal to zero.

If P is large enough, it might not be possible to directly observe its "zero-ness".

Which would imply that we cannot reject out-of-hand the possibility that such a number exists.

The Internet is great for those who wish to educate themselves informally and cheaply.

But what if you want to achieve a formal qualification?

This article describes an architecture for an Internet-based computerised examination system.

Does the human brain have a "central" point of control?

Is the brain like an orchestra, with a conductor, or is it not like an orchestra?

Why do orchestras have conductors? Don't the musicians already know how to play the music?

Consciousness doesn't make all the decisions in your brain.

Nor does consciousness propose possible decisions.

But consciousness does make a final "yes"/"no" choice on all important decisions proposed.

And consciousness is held accountable for those choices that it makes.

The synaptic inputs to every neuron are like voters that vote for and against the decision to fire.

A small number of important websites are explicitly or implicitly vote-based.

In the brain, the internal "voting" neurons are more numerous than the neurons that connect externally.

To make the internet more like a conscious brain, we need more vote-based websites. Many, many more.

They tell us: "Don't hard-code your constants"

But what if a constant is a string value which names something?

What do you call it?

FREDS_NAME = "fred" ????

A password that can be found after only 10000 guesses is "weak".

But why does your website allow a user to attempt 10000 logins?

Is it a case of "dear user, please do more work so that our web developers can do less work"?

An "identity thief" opens a credit card account in your name.

Now, supposedly, you owe money to the credit card company.

Who is responsible for preventing this identity "theft"? Is it your job to "get your identity back"?

Actually, the credit card company is falsely accusing you of not paying the bill.

Because you did not sign up for the credit card.

"Purpose" seems unscientific, because it posits cause and effect in the wrong order.

But science should be able to explain any aspect of reality.

Purpose is an aspect of reality, so science should be able to explain it.

The scientific explanation of purpose is that selection processes can reverse cause and effect.

To get the first digit, calculate the cube root of the first 3 digits.

To get the last digit, calculate the cube root mod 10.

To get the middle digit, calculate the cube root mod 11.

The Technological Singularity happens when technology speeds up the development of technology.

Open-source software can be deployed faster and to more users than anything else.

Open-source software can acquire technology faster and from more contributors than anything else.

Therefore, an "open-source singularity" may happen before any other kind of singularity happens.

"Naming" is the "second hardest problem" in software development.

Cryptographic hashing can automatically name everything with a unique name.

Problem solved! (OK, now we have the problem of how to read the code ...)

"Making yourself do things" seems like a solution to the "motivation" problem.

But making youself do things is not cost-free, because it uses up "mind energy".

It helps if you can be aware of where new mind energy comes from.

It's hard enough for amateur scientists to do any kind of science, and be taken seriously.

Theoretical science appears to be 100% the domain of professionals.

Can amateur scientists contribute to the development of scientific theories?

Can we invent new Internet/Web technologies to solve this problem?

An overhang candidate is an independent electoral candidate who does not belong to a party.

Make both your electoral vote and your party vote count towards choosing the next government.

Morality is not just "there exist rules, which everyone must follow"

Morality is also about determining the rules, and deciding when to follow the rules, and passing judgement on others.

Your brain is programmed to process moral truths the same way it processes other "truths".

So morality feels absolute, even though it isn't actually absolute.

All living organisms live in a world of finite resources. They always have.

So long-term reproductive success is always relative. Whoever wins, others must lose.

Therefore, for humanity, there is no "Common Good".

Other than the continued survival of the human race as a species.

Unless, perhaps, we can avoid the finiteness by expanding into outer space.

Your worldview is what tells you the relationships between causes and delayed effects.

Pre-learned instincts and learning from experience cannot give you a sophisticated worldview.

To interpret experience effectively, you have to a priori have a worldview.

The only efficient method for acquiring such a worldview is uncritical listening.

Specific neurons represent specific meanings.

But we know that intermediate neurons do not have pre-determined meanings.

So how do these neurons "decide" which meanings to represent?

A simulation of a washing machine is not a washing machine.

A simulated washing machine does not wash clothes.

A simulated calculator does the same calculations as a real calculator. So it is a calculator.

Two algorithms can be "the same", even though they have different steps.

The are the same because they express the same "idea" of how and why they solve some problem.

This "idea" can be formalised as a mathematical proof of the algorithm's correctness.

$1 (US) can buy a blank CD (or DVD).

Install "your" software onto the CD.

Use the CD to boot a rented computer.

It's (almost) like having your own computer.