I just had a dream where Alex and I were walking along somewhere and suddenly someone came up to rob us at gunpoint. But we didn't have anything.

And I had a gun in my pocket, and got in a position to flank the robber, and was trying to figure out whether it'd be a good idea to shoot, threaten to, or do nothing... and if I were going to take action, how I could do it without risking hitting Alex by accident, having the robber outgun me, or putting myself in a legally bad position.

And then I woke up.

... in the apartment.

I have no idea where it came from; I just noticed him behaving oddly (walking around under the corner coffee table, where he never goes), then saw he was playing with a gray mouse. I thought it was one of the toy ones and was surprised - he only likes the white ones - but then it darted under something and I realized it was alive.

It took a fair amount of chase to find the thing; it darted from one hiding place to another, staying perfectly still inbetween, hard to spot. I cornered it twice and had it slip away. Finally, I had it cornered under Alex's desk; Ki thought it was in the other corner and didn't see it, but I did, and it was totally frozen from seeing him right there.

So I got a cup and carefully put it over it, then slipped a piece of paper under the cup, then a folder and then a clipboard. And I released it outside in the little patch of garden.

Ki was decent at finding the thing, though several times he seemed to totally loose track of it when I clearly saw where it'd gone. And a couple times he actually picked it up in his mouth, moved it elsewhere, and relased it. Not sure if he's just ignorant of how to kill a mouse, or was deliberately playing with it. He's done this before, though. As far as I could tell, the mouse was completely unharmed by the experience (though probably will have mousey PTSD).

At least for this thing, I'm so not catlike. My response is "meep!" not "hunt!".

Normally I'd get Alex to do it, but he just left for a week. :(

Whee, I guess?

Should think of something to do.

Zombie Infection 2

To run it in your browser (w/ Java):
1. click here
2. click 'setup'
3. click 'go'

Clicking 'setup' will (randomly) reset the simulator.

It's a zombie infection simulator written by Alex & me which does:
* zombies (w/ time to eat, lifespan / increased lifespan from eating, and ability to break down walls)
* civilians (w/ panicability and breeding speed)
* military (w/ ability to recruit back up to their starting numbers, and ability to use pocket nukes under duress that will take out a bunch of zombies at once)

The defaults make for a fairly balanced war, and zombies will tend to make warrens.

Zombie aging is off by default; if you turn it on you'll notice that they survive much more poorly. Civilian panic duration very significantly helps zombies - most of their kills are made by panicking civilians (or military!) running into them.

The AI is pretty simple - zombies shamble towards the first thing they see (whether zombie, civilian, or military) and convert it if they get it first; military runs towards zombies, or failing that, areas of panic; and civilians run blindly away from zombies (... often into another one).

But it's fun to play with.

Feel free to use it however you like under Creative Commons license by-sa (i.e. credit us and share any improvements you make).

We'd love to hear your comments, feedback, etc.

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DRnXASa1VM

Transcription: 3a23a e 5'45e 35a24a a 5'35; e 45'i 24o 25a25i; è 25i25i 24o 25'25o e; e 25'a25ó e; a 25'a25ó 35'o 3a23a 35'e; e e a a

Translation - http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AbqrbUJbrkeOZGRiOGJ4NWNfMTA5Z2pqcnZ3MnQ
Grammar - http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AbqrbUJbrkeOZGRiOGJ4NWNfOTVneDU0OGtkZg&hl=en
Vocab - http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AjmetJxi-p0VcC1yN0VlcnhfbkVJQ0stNnVuME55R1E&hl=en

Original CONLANG translation thread, by Herman Miller: http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0906d&L=conlang&T=0&O=D&P=26349

What I'm actually running:

/opt/local/bin/ruby -e p(Process.pid.to_s) -e load(ARGV.shift) -I /Applications/Aptana Studio/plugins/org.rubypeople.rdt.launching_1.0.3.200807071913NGT/ruby/flush -rrdt_stream_sync.rb -- script/server webrick --port=3000 --environment=development --binding=127.0.0.1

What it thinks it is:

$0 #=> '-e'
$* #=> ['webrick', '--port=3000', '--environment=development', '--binding=127.0.0.1']

What it's supposed to be:
$0 the name of the ruby script file
$* the command line arguments

... kinda weird. I wonder if there's a better way for the ruby proc to figure out what its actual command line is.

Also weird:

$ ruby
puts 'x' [press enter then control-D]
xD [output]

Alex thinks (probably correctly) that this is because:

$ echo 'puts $0' | ruby
-

So the terminal itself? is outputting '-' (standard "read from stdin"). Then when I hit ctrl-d, it outputs '^D', on the same line, first. Then the output ('x') overwrites the '^'.

Silly terminal.

I was in MPH12 all last weekend, on the Drunken Spiders team. (Via Alex, via Google people.)

'twas quite fun despite being lost half of the time. We came in 4th of 11 for the Bay Area teams. (Despite being an "unofficially recreational" team. The 1st place team was very definitely non-recreational and a Serious Team; they had matching t-shirts and everything! :-P)

See the puzzles for yourself.

Neat parts:
* weird conversation (eg via Curtis: "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a sushi extruder!"; spontaneous singing [to ocarina accompaniment] of Still Alive; etc)
* very neat and devious puzzles that make head hurty
* for my first Hunt I did pretty well; solved or half-solved a decent share of puzzles (including one ranked fastest solve ^^)
* hosts were very well-prepared hunt-wise
* teammates fun, friendly (when not really groggy and pissed off), and damn smart
* most of the puzzles were fair (e.g. no uncued anagramming or other lame tricks)
* the videos were funny

Lame parts:
* we didn't get to play Death in a game of chess on a soccer-ball board (or as Alex would call it, a rhombicosidodecahedron) made up of the three meta-puzzles (a rhombic triacontahedron [a d30, or a d20 with weird flattenings], a dodecahedron [d20], and an icosahedron [d12])
* Silverlight and .NET were required. (WTF. At least the .NET - which I might add is only available for Windows [fail!] - was only for one puzzle)
* said Silverlight was demonstrated to be a buggy and Bad. They would've been better off just using normal AJAX. (Or *cough*Flash*cough*)
* our 'net connection was seriously overloaded
* said Silverlight and 'net connection the videos run really really badly. They should've just linked to the damn .wmv files. (And seriously, wmv not avi or mpg? FAP FAP FAP, Microsoft.) We were reduced to watching it off of Curtis' monitor... who was in Portland using video Skype. FAIL.
* we 'oversolved' one puzzle (which was previously intended to be the correct meta-meta solution within that puzzle but had been downgraded to just the meta-solution)
* the solution site doesn't show you the Jeopardy board (but on the other hand, it *was* silverlight... so maybe this isn't all bad)

... is actually pretty good.

Kashi GoLean + raisins + shredded cheddar + soymilk.

I'll admit, I did it initially on an implied dare from Alex. But I had it again today.

My Canon MP470 scanner/printer is randomly printing stuff.

Namely, this stuff:

( Read more... )

... wtf?

It just starts printing when turned on, or just whenever without provocation.

I can't read the handwriting well enough to tell what it is, except that it's in Spanish and has something to do with airplane design. Translations?

Edit: ... or skiing tips?

Grr time.

Based on Alex's post on CONLANG: http://archives.conlang.info/pha/jialzau/badeirfal.html

... for 3 weeks, back to Canada whence he came.

It's cold here. *dramatic sigh*

[xposted from CONLANG-L]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 11:48 AM, Sai Emrys wrote:
> recently we started figuring out how we might be able to make a conlang entirely mediated by touch (of the sort where we could talk to each other discretely, masked by normal behavior like holding hands).

So, we discussed this again more recently.

To specify the domain better, the language we're trying to make should be:
* able to communicate simple and maybe meta* things (doesn't need to be capable of Shakespeare or neuroscience)
* communicable entirely by the speakers' hands being grasped together or the like (as is socially normal for couples in most situations - though I'd like to expand this to other forms of casual touch also)

By "meta", I mean that the grip-language may occur in parallel to an ongoing, and separately sensible, acoustic language - and would act as some sort of meta-commentary to it in real time.


First, one thing came up that's a philosophical? question of analysis.

One phonetic feature of the domain is that the primary two grips (opposite hands gripping, thumbs same direction, palms together, fingers interlaced) are symmetrically asymmetric - A's thumb is either outside or inside B's.

Switching between these two grips (let's call them A or B dominant based on whose thumb is on the outside) is a relatively elaborate cascade or disengage-reëngage process, thus seems like something that would not be done frequently.

Alex's analogy for this was to vowel harmony & suprasegmental features more generally, which I think is apt.

The question is, does one analyze the words [k2r2m] vs [korom] as: a) being phonemically /k2r2m/ vs /korom/, with an non-semantic rule that vowels are supposed to be frontness-harmonic, or b) being phonemically both /k$r$m/ where $ signifies a mid rounded vowel, frontness unspecified, and frontness is a separate bit property of the whole word

Another example from ASL is hand dominance. E.g. HELP is dominant hand /A/ resting on base /B/; dominance is a non-phonological property in ASL (except in explicitly visual-spatial context). One could however analyze this as actually being two distinct signs, left A on right B vs right A on left B, with some handwaving about some signers preferring one over another form, but being allophonic.

However, suppose that I were to create ASL', in which using reverse dominance to one's true dominance carries ironic pragma. How then would one analyze it - as being a feature of each phone, of each phoneme, of each "word" (granted that 'word' is a bit ambiguous in ASL), or of a sentence / utterance overall? At some level it is specified, and at the levels below that it is not.

My preference is to analyze this sort of thing as being a bit "belonging to" the level at which it changes meaning - so if e.g. [k2r2m] vs [korom] is cat vs dog, then that's to the word itself; if it's ironic vs normal then it's to the utterance overall (unless it's just that word that's emphasizedly ironic, in which case the word again); and if yet it's indicative of deferential vs superior politeness marking, then certainly to the entire utterance or even the discourse.

I'd be interested to read y'alls' thoughts on this.


Second, we made a preliminary pass at enumerating the phonological inventory. This is divided into a few semi-parallelized channels:

* grip: A-dominant, B-dominant; possibly other variants also, not fully enumerated

* thumb disposition: default, dominant thumb under sub thumb (sub-dominant?), and dominant pointer over sub thumb (double dominant?)
- I do double dominant by leaving dom thumb as is, and just moving dom pointer over the tip of sub thumb, in a somewhat side-by-side position)

* disposition transitions: short-short, short-stroke, or stroke-* (I found stroke-stroke and stroke-short to be too hard to reliably do differently)
- short = minimal contact w/ other finger except as needed to transition
- stroke = stroke up or down other finger during that segment of the transition

* motions:
- 1..5th knuckle press (coded by recipient's knuckle, thumb = 1st)
- 1..4th gap press (1st gap = thumb web)
- 1..4th short gap press (gap press is made w/ finger extended, short gap press w/ finger pad pulled back to be against the fleshier bit)
- ? 1..5th finger squeeze (coded by squeezer's lower-ordinal squeezing finger, e.g. dom 1st squeeze = squeeze sub thumb w/ thumb & pointer)
- ? finger separation (only possible from double-dominant grip)
- ? some subset of the combinations thereof

* elbow-dominance (walking hand-in-hand, dominant elbow is in front)

* torsion (?neutral, dominant out, and dominant in - e.g. dominant out has the whole dominant thumb base outside the sub thumb)
- ? possibly these can be characterized as motions instead of states


Some possible issues with the domain:
* for me (though not for Alex), fourth and fifth finger action is not entirely seperable (so there will be noise between the two)
* we have different grip dominance preference (interlace your fingers together - which way do you prefer? I like my right thumb dominant, he likes left), so one of us is always a bit awkward with a grip
* Alex dislikes the double dominant position for being too squeezy, for making thumb usefulness worse, and magnifying grip asymmetry
* thumb disposition and grip both significantly affect the motions one can do, and the perception of them; one issue e.g. is whether to code recipient xor presser finger as phonological

Suggestions?

Anyone done similar?

Any languages for deaf-blind worth stealing from (e.g. that aren't just some originally-for-sighted sign language done using recipient hands to feel the signer's)?

VoicePost 383K 2:02

“A 3 a.m. reading of the half-dream poem below, with a short comment afterwards.” Transcribed by: multiple users

I ache for the touch
of a song upon my lips,
of the tingle at the tips
of my fingers when I'm taken
by a muse, and then awaken
to the tendrils of a dream
in which I ken I'd something more

I write, and the song
grows like smoke-streams in my mind –
still so thin, and I so blind;
and I grasp, but in that motion
it is gone, and I've a notion
that if I would catch a dream
maybe I ought still myself more

I breathe, and again
there's that feel under the skin
as if seeing through a thin
sheen of nothing, into something
that I knew, but in waking
was like shadows of a dream
which then by daylight seem no more

I still, and begin,
knowing not when I'll be done –
with an echo in the air
as my guidance, be it bare,
to a place past the horizon,
where what here is but a dream
awake could live again once more.



This is probably the first poem I've written in which I actually intended and shaped the *sound* of it. Usually what I've written is purely textual, to me.

The last paragraph is meant to allude to an earlier set of poems I wrote entitled The Calm, in particular Alchemy, the first and best one of them. In a way, this is a better take on Memory.

For inspiration, I have the soundtrack to the musical Spring Awakening (e.g. The Guilty Ones @ 2m40s), and the feel of Alex's skin on mine as a catalyst of the thought. Plus the usual background, of half-forgotten magic, which is all too true (if hard to explain to any who have not known it themselves). I wonder sometimes, which is the dreaming and which awake...

To Alex and Tiki, thus, I dedicate this poem.

The poem is self-descriptive; I sat down with that longing, knowing only that I had something to get out, and that that process itself was the topic.

I realize in retrospect that I messed up the rhyme in the fourth stanza, but ah well, I'll leave it be. I was aiming more for the meter anyhow.

I'm happy.

I don't know how to convey the exact nuance of this in text; I don't mean it in the usual, state-of-day sense.

There is such intensity about my enjoyment of the world these days. Nigh every day, there's at least something that makes me deliriously happy.

To a great extent, this feels part of a path of seeking to embody the title of this journal. It is like this is just a process of removing the obstacles, the day-to-day hindrances, the forgetting of sacredness. Remembering to, literally, pause to smell the roses on the way home.

Other than Alex, I don't feel like I'm happy *about* anything particular.

I still remember what things were like a mere few years ago. The contrast is incredible, and also seemingly a large part of why I have such focused appreciation of things now.

Learning the skill of really, emphatically, consciously enjoying things has been so very worth it. Make no mistake, this is not an accident - it's something that I've been working on for years now, in parallel to the rest of what I sometimes call bodhi and sometimes just calm brilliance.

Was it worth the bad years? I can't say. That feels nigh like someone else asking whether my freedoms are worth the deaths of soldiers to secure them; it is not a sacrifice I could ask or easily do willingly, but it is nevertheless one from which I benefit tremendously.

Speaking of Alex, we're now moved in to our new apartment in Berkeley. It's comfortable; just the right size for us. (Or will be, once we get a couple desks and shelves.)

He's gone for the week visiting his family, but coming home still makes me feel glowy and ... *home*. Much of that is that he mirrors my tactility; I've not been so regularly, thoroughly touch-sated in a long time. Nor have I been as regularly challenged mentally, especially in domains I relatively know. It's fun.

Ki, of course, is his usual - kittenish and bouncing off walls at times, lazily cuddly at others. Like me, I suppose. I'm still very glad to have him.



More mundanely, I finally got my new desktop functionally triple-booting OSX.5.2 / Vista 64 / Kubuntu Hardy 64 + KDE4. There are a few things left to fix pending availability of internet (OSX audio drivers, Kubuntu binary video drivers, Windows ext2 driver, codecs and various standard programs and so on all 'round), and I'm waiting on two more hard drives I ordered (also 750gb) to be able to completely get my media off my old and barely functional external drives (and finish the rip & edit of LCC2 + LCC1 + LCC1 Interviews videos).

I would very much not recommend trying this for anyone who doesn't have patience, a new hard drive that can be completely reformatted multiple times to get it right, a level of comfort with making changes to / diagnostics of low-level boot behavior, and pristine installation media. (The Kubuntu live CD, in particular, was very helpful to have around. Incomparably more functional than Vista's installation DVD utilities, and more than OSX's too.)

(As an aside:
* Note to Microsoft: There are more formats than NTFS in the world; deal. Restarting multiple times for an installation, especially without warning, is just bad form. So is squirreling away key configuration in poorly documented, tool-accessible-only config files. So is having crippled defaults.
* Note to OSX: Sometimes I actually do want to see the details. Stop being all pretty and show me 'em when I tell you to. There are more computers in the world than Mac, so please stop the pretension. And when I force quit something, please actually kill it dead and not let it hang my computer.
* Note to Ubuntu: I shouldn't HAVE to know the details to be able to do basic things... especially when those details are not available in man grub. Comments in random files in /etc do not count as documentation. Dying with cryptic error messages when something doesn't go perfectly in the groove is Very Bad Design.

... there, now all sides are equally enrailed. ;-) )


But it works: I can boot into any of 'em, share data successfully via the common partitions, run moreorless all core functionality. I have yet to succesfully run any of them from the others, on real partition, in virtualization, but I guess that can wait (it's not a critical feature anyhow). Once I have internet, I'll set up my SSH / VPN / NoX / Aptana / etc and seriously get to work on Project Silk Hat.

I've not been completely slack in the meantime - riding BART to and from work every day has given me lots of time to read up on critical technologies I'll need, develop fairly detailed specs, and really think through the details of such things as the economic/monetization system, gameplay, meta-gameplay, etc. I give this project about a 25% chance of paying out enough for me to bootstrap into anything else I care to do with my life. Even if it doesn't work, the way I'll be structuring it, a great part of the work will be reusable in other projects. And it'll be just plain fun to code a project of my own again. A la Graham, I judge it worth the risk of investment, especially for my current situation.

Alex has helped with some of this, also. It's wonderful to have someone to bounce ideas off of, especially as regards the algorithmically complex aspects of the project. (Of which there are a couple serious chunks; I'll probably be using multiple Bayes nets as one part of the core functionality. Add a meta-algorithm running on top of that on large amounts of data, and a need to operate at very fast speed [i.e. not n^n], and this means that it'll be fairly interesting to design.)

Depending on how much time I get to allocate to it, I hope to release within a couple months. That's relatively slow by Rails standards, but given the competitive environment and the opportunity to be effectively first in market, I've decided not to do an iterative public release - I'll release once the app is fairly robust, so that it can grow too fast for anyone to catch up or clone me.

This of course is only one of my outstanding projects:

* "Silk Hat" (the game, and my current top priority)
* "Solomon" (a major political app, which will require a lot more prep work in research than in coding per se)
* MotoStudy (a major, long-term research project)
* Necker Priming (a short cog-ling research study)
* Constructive Linguistics 101 (a book)
* Meditation for Hackers (also a book)
* Language Creation Conference
* self-prep for neurocog PhD
* NLF2DWS
* other selfimprovement (habit-changing, aikido, exercise, bodhi, etc)

The first two are, of course, code names and not the real ones. Not to mention, of course, my Day Job. :-P



I guess I have no more to say than this: Life has become more than I could imagine several times over by now.

I'm happy.

*glow*

... are hilarious. (And Canadian, like 4pq1injbok, whence the recommendation.)

If you like Weird Al, TMBG, or Tom Lehrer, you must listen.

Incidentally for the eyepatched among ye, it's on a torrent (though several files are lacking and at least one is a very poor rip).

Website, Lyrics

http://cornellmath.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/the-axiom-of-choice-is-wrong/

This has to be reducible to 0=1.

/me renews suspicion of all mathematicians