Page of Moss - bloglet for Sunday 21 January 2001

So this is it. I'm moving to a real domain name. Coming soon: http://www.m14m.net
06:43:43 PM, Sunday 21 January 2001

I've got a desk! This could change everything!
03:28:16 AM, Saturday 20 January 2001

WTF? Why would a DVD of Grosse Pointe Blank be an "Official Licensed NBA Product". Basketball? Huh?
11:09:34 PM, Friday 19 January 2001

Moo: http://world.std.com/~franl/moo.html : user extensible world.
Open Quake: http://www.telefragged.com/openquake/ : information on the open source Quake engine, useful for rendering and for communication protocol.
Advogato: http://www.advogato.com/ : demonstration of trust metric.
DNS Resources Directory: http://www.dns.net/dnsrd/ : information about DNS.
Freenet: http://www.freenetproject.org : robust P2P filesharing.
These are a few good places to start looking for ideas about how to build a large, distributed, 3d, multi-user, user-extensible, persistent shared environment.
04:46:45 PM, Friday 19 January 2001

Well, Neil seems to read them too, or at least respond to them.
01:25:44 AM, Friday 19 January 2001

I'm drawing a 'I lost at pool so this is my punishment game' person.
12:03:01 AM, Friday 19 January 2001

The fastest way to send someone a frog is to send them a compressed copy of the frog DNA sequence. Anything else you sent them would still have to include the complete frog genome, because the frog can't function properly without it. (Hmm... would this be enough, or would you also have to send them a frog cell to put it in?)
08:16:03 PM, Thursday 18 January 2001

Well, I read the bloglets, but I'll admit that it does look suspiciously like nobody else does. Katherine's descriptions of them are just right... she's also right that it's a pity if nobody is seeing them. Or, well, perhaps I should say, you're right. I'll add that Mirabai's bloglet has returned to us, and that I, at least, have high hopes for it. I'll also add that Katherine's bloglet (which she quite sensibly refrained from describing herself) is one of the best of them... not at all sure how to describe how it reads, but it does sound just like Katherine.
12:52:47 AM, Thursday 18 January 2001

Somewhat thrillingly, I read on Wiki that "Ontology recapitulates philology" was also coined by Willard Van Orman Quine: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WillardVanOrmanQuine
12:41:46 PM, Wednesday 17 January 2001

I think I should go to Wales.
01:00:16 AM, Wednesday 17 January 2001

I could never sleep my way to the top, because my alarm clock always wakes me right up.
07:21:21 PM, Tuesday 16 January 2001

Hey! Wait a second! I came just to cheer you on! The weight-of-a-human doll came too.
12:36:52 AM, Tuesday 16 January 2001

This looks like it could be useful to me, and the fastest way to be able to find it again at home is to put it on my bloglet. If you're also a Java programmer that's about to learn C++, you might look at this too... but I don't think there are any such people reading my bloglet. So. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it is my bloglet, after all. http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs123/javatoc.html
07:44:25 PM, Monday 15 January 2001

Every great scientific truth goes through three stages:
First, people say it conflicts with the Bible.
Next they say it had been discovered before.
Lastly, they say they always believed it.
--Jean Louis Agassiz (1807-1883)
Found it quoted on WikiWikiWeb. Having just been reading Dennet's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, this was a nice quote to come across. Dennet still thinks Darwinian evolution conflicts with the Bible.
03:51:54 PM, Friday 12 January 2001

My Java source code now has 17% less fat, thanks to a careful use of objects.
07:47:20 PM, Thursday 11 January 2001

One way in which global markets are less free is that information takes longer to spread through a larger market, both because of geographical issues (which are still very real) and because of the increase in the number of people that need to be informed. This is essentially a much more abstract restatement of one of Wendell Berry's main reasons for buying locally: it's much easier to know what your getting when something is manufactured locally, and it's easier to influence the manufacturer. Note that this also puts the lie to the claim that all anti-globalization views are protectionist--it's not that you should buy American, it's that you should by from businesses local to wherever you are.
04:26:54 PM, Thursday 11 January 2001

The cliche, 'I'm going insane' should be used in a situation like this.
11:58:25 PM, Wednesday 10 January 2001

"Information wants to be anthropomorphized."
--Golias, on Slashdot
12:08:17 PM, Tuesday 9 January 2001

To expand on the previous entry: maybe the thing to do is, first, to start restructuring the governmental implementation of the economy so as to be more modular, and second, to start refactoring it mercilessly, making minor incremental changes to correct for anything that seems wrong. The whole Extreme Programming analogy, is, of course, practically out the window at this point (what on earth would be the legislative equivalent, or value, even, of PairProgramming).
06:07:14 PM, Monday 8 January 2001

ExtremeProgramming also useful in sociopolitical problems? Communism certainly feels like an example of BigDesignUpFront, as does the sort of idealized capitalism embraced by Ayn Rand's followers. Getting to a better system, in any really beneficial way, will involve making a lot of little changes, and possibly even making it possible to change things in a more modular way. Examples of this in Real Life? U.S. Constitution as success for BigDesignUpFront? Or, alternately, U.S. Constitution and amendments as example of ExtremeProgramming?
06:01:00 PM, Monday 8 January 2001

It occurs to me that the culturally stabilizing mental detachment that I do with animal rights issues, to avoid having to consider becoming a vegetarian, is essentially the same as the culturally stabilizing mental detachment that is done by all of us who live comfortably in a capitalist system to prevent having to consider those whose lives are destroyed by this system. What's interesting about both of these cases is that they are intentional layers of isolation to keep us from examining our lives. Also that they seem to be necessary. Also that they seem to be useful, even when engaged in the kind of examination that they seem to protect against. I'm not sure how clear all this is.
05:46:56 PM, Monday 8 January 2001

Another article on re-engineering money, this time on K5, which continues to be a rather impressive site. Almost exactly the goal I've been thinking about: "all the wonders of capitalism without all of the downsides".
01:46:42 PM, Thursday 4 January 2001

Skimming The Stone Society... have some doubts about apparent dependence on a software platform. Note that we also depend on technological infrastructure in our current economy (printing money, for example. at a minimum, gold mines and scales), but we take advantage of properties of matter like persistence and uniqueness, which have to be simulated in a software-based system. Wish there was a clear way to implement Good Digital Cash Without A Server.
07:09:41 PM, Wednesday 3 January 2001

It appears that someone else out there has been thinking along the same lines that I have been in some of my recent entries on economics. That is, thinking of a capitalist economy as a special case of a decentralized, highly scalable system for distributing resources. (Or something to that effect... I'm still not entirely sure how to phrase it). Anyhow, take a look at http://home.san.rr.com/merel/ss.html . It may not be exactly what I would come up with (I'm still thinking, also I haven't read it in detail yet), but it looks to be exactly the sort of thing I want people to be thinking about.
07:03:57 PM, Wednesday 3 January 2001

If your text editor automatically indents program blocks (like vim does), then you can use it as an outliner, by parenthesizing each new level of outlining. If the above is not a sufficient explanation, this wouldn't be useful to you anyway.
07:05:18 PM, Tuesday 2 January 2001

"I've got a problem with it. ... I don't know how human beings can divine the intent of another voter ... by looking at a ballot."
--Gov. Jeb Bush, quoted in Slate
(and yes, I'd love to know what they elided)
11:41:41 AM, Friday 29 December 2000

www.workspot.net offers a free Linux/KDE desktop through VNC. That's rather startling to me.
08:41:03 PM, Thursday 28 December 2000

I like Douglas Hofstadter even more now that I've seen a picture of him.
08:26:37 PM, Thursday 28 December 2000

Does the general feeling against for-profit schools indicate that people have something of an instinctive awareness that market competition reduces the quality of the goods and services that are sold?
05:30:06 PM, Thursday 28 December 2000

I mean nice people, baby wait, I didn't mean to say nightmare.
05:16:35 PM, Thursday 28 December 2000

Okay: we can divide all games into two classes. First, there are games like evolution, where the players are individual agents, but the dealer is not (in the case of evolution, the dealer is a combination of physical forces and the overall population of agents). Later, there are games like the classic example of Prisoner's Dilemma, where the dealer too is an agent (in this case, the state--at least, we can treat it as approximately an individual agent). If the dealer isn't an agent, the best hope players have is to conspire to maximise the collective score. If the dealer is an agent, though, he can reform the rules so that the best collective strategy is also best individually. The question for economic reform is, is the dealer in economics an agent or a natural force? I suspect that, in this case, the dealer is a combination of both, but it does seem to consist of some parts that are clearly agents. Copyright law (controlled by the state) is a good example, as is currency.
02:49:10 PM, Thursday 28 December 2000

I would have thought that what I wanted to do would at least be obvious to me. Oh well.
10:09:18 PM, Wednesday 27 December 2000

"Peace, quiet, and a T-1 line". It's utterly brilliant. I can't believe someone didn't think of it before. The prices are even reasonable, for an airport. And I can telnet in to check my email. What more could you ask for.
09:11:39 PM, Tuesday 26 December 2000

The problem with capitalism--or, indeed, with communism, with socialism, or with whatever your favorite style of economy happens to be--is not that it's a complete failure. Indeed, experience has shown that it tends to distribute goods reasonably well, while not interfering too severely with individual freedom. The problem is that it's only a very partial success, and that people tend to view the whole question (of finding the best structure for the economy) as something to be considered lightly, to judge the question on primarily political grounds, and to consider as answers only those solutions that have arisen naturally over the course of human history. Real progress will only become possibly when we see the very structure of the economy (and not merely the activities of units within that structure) as a machine to be developed and improved using the best engineering techniques we have at our disposal.
09:29:40 PM, Wednesday 13 December 2000

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