Mark's journal

I've been writing mad libs on the refrigerator here lately. My housemate is very creative, so she rises to the occasion. The last one caused her to write about the coming robot apocalypse. I wrote this tonight:

My ____ ____ unnaturally ____. Please ____, or ____ will ____ us all. Love, ____

From chat.

<Someone> ... I just saw something worse than Goatse.
<Me> Results 1 - 10 of about 4,430 for "worse than Goatse". (0.15 seconds)
<Me> Results 1 - 10 of about 282 for "worse than Goatse and tubgirl". (0.35 seconds)
<Me> Results 1 - 1 of 1 for "worse than Goatse and tubgirl and lemonparty". (0.32 seconds)
<Me> oh, and
<Me> Results 1 - 5 of 5 for "worse than bloodninja". (0.24 seconds)

I feel the hands of God in this.

The early BBC report, as well as later rumors, claimed that David Carradine died due to an accident with autoerotic asphyxiation.

First off, I'm glad that he may have died in a state of biochemical grace. I admired his work, especially in the Kill Bill films.

Second, I think this was a preventable death.

One would expect that in this day and age, one could build and sell a simple device that cuts or loosens the rope if blood oxygen levels drop dangerously low for more than a user-settable amount of time (not to exceed 2-3 min).

But that would require that the oxygen sensor be clipped onto a finger, and that could easily slip off during feverish prayer. But that could lead to the development of less intrusive blood oxygenation sensors.

(I sense a patent coming my way.)

Update: Added link

I bought a copy of Meta-Magick: The Book of Atem a few weeks ago, and began reading it. This book, rooted in neurolinguistic programming (NLP), makes a lot of interesting suggestions, and contains a 36-day set of exercises for developing one's awareness and self-programming skills.

I learned a few NLP-related things a few years ago from a practitioner in the Bay Area. The list of presuppositions he gave me helped me release a tremendous amount of self-judgment that I had carried with me from childhood. In particular, the statement that "there is a positive intention behind every action" helped me look at some of my counterproductive behaviors more clearly, and create alternatives that were much more supportive of other aspects of my life.

As a result of what I learned from the NLP counselor, I have made considerable progress in my own development by adopting two general habits: questioning my assumptions and thoughts, and fostering more explicit dialogue within myself. But in those two activities, NLP only served as a jumping-off point, rather than a training regimen.

In the time since those encounters, I've had a continuing interest in NLP, but never felt like I had a real handle on what it was about. I lacked the money to go to any seminars or workshops. I did pick up a few things here and there about it, but nothing that resembled a cohesive body of knowledge.

So in response to what I've read thus far in Meta-Magick, I looked up the Wikipedia article on NLP, which led me to a critical article about NLP from the Skeptic's Dictionary. The critique also gave me a lot to think about, and showed me that there does not seem to be a single coherent body of knowledge on this topic. But the most valuable short-term thing I take from it is the idea that if I do the guided meditation exercises in Meta-Magick in good faith, the burden of proof will be on the book and not me.

I may do the exercises soon. If and when I finish, I'll post my impressions here.

I've been a coder for most of my career. I have not tried to exercise any significant design sense with regard to web pages, until recently. I'm now creating a website for someone here in Columbus all by myself, which means that I am now learning how to build style sheets and make the site look good.

To that end, I thought it would be nice to put in some navigational buttons -- iconic buttons that one can click to move through a time-ordered sequence of pages (first, previous, next, and last). Since the latest fashion statement seems to be to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to accomplish this, I decided to give that a try. CSS was one of the few areas in web development that remained a mystery to me, so I thought it would be an interesting challenge. (Cue the theme music from "Gilligan's Island.")

Four days later, after reading far too many pages on CSS buttons, I think I have
a working solution. I'm posting it here to try to save someone else the grief I went through. (The source of the demo page includes all the necessary style information and markup.) I've been told that image flicker may still occur in some versions of Internet Explorer, so caveat lector.
( Read more... )

From chat.

<someone> MVE Semen Tanks - sementank.net - MVE Semen Tanks XC Millenium $499 Buy the Best and Skp the Rest
<someone> wonder what gmail is trying to tell me
<me> it wants you to pay $500 for a semen tank. whatever it's asking you to do must be very wrong. unless you're a veterinarian.
<me> because, you know, horse juice occupies a lot of volume.
<me> for that application, i imagine you could recoup the cost after only a few uses.

I was working on something this morning, and thought I'd share the solution, even if it is easy to recreate.

I wanted to rotate a list in Python left or right by a certain number of elements. I wanted elements which dropped off one end to be rotated back in from the other end. I would be doing this rotation a fixed and small number of times to short lists, so high efficiency was not necessary in this case. I also didn't want the size of the list to constrain the rotation.

So, I ended up combining two slices, like this:

import copy
import math

def rotate_list(l, offset):
    """
    Rotate a list by (offset) elements. Elements which fall off
    one side are provided again on the other side.
    Returns a rotated copy of the list. If (offset) is 0,
    returns a copy of (l).
    
    Examples:
        >>> rotate_list([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], 2)
        [3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2]
        >>> rotate_list([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], -2)
        [5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4]
    """
    if len(l) == 0:
        raise ValueError("Must provide a list with 1 or more elements")
    if offset == 0:
        rv = copy.copy(l)
    else:
        real_offset = offset % int(math.copysign(len(l), offset))
        rv = (l[real_offset:] + l[:real_offset])
    return rv

I'm posting this because my Google search for "python two slices" yielded far more complicated approaches.

Update: Added a check for zero-length lists. If you don't pass a list in the first place, you get what you deserve.

(I started this as a response to a Facebook post by a friend who lives in Hong Kong, in which he made some observations about the state of the US.)

I told myself about a decade ago that I could never again live in most of America, and that only San Francisco felt like home any more.

Now, being back in Columbus, I realize that I've changed so much, become so much more flexible in some unspoken set of internal parameters, that home is now wherever I am.

I suppose the difference is that nowadays, I have a much stronger sense of who I really am.

This doesn't mean I don't still want to return to the west coast. On the contrary, I feel more strongly than ever that I belong there. But I don't feel the same continual counter-intention out here in the middle of America. I have peaceful language with which to describe my experience to people both here and out west. I can reach a reasonable level of satisfaction now, regardless of what people and tools are available to me.

I feel like I've been working for years to build up to this point.

Can I stop being Midwestern yet?

I hit an emotional rock bottom last night. The thing that pulled me out of it was contemplation of the Buddhist Wheel of Life.

I talked with a close friend for hours today, and I feel much better now as a result.

But after talking about the Wheel with her, I've come to realize that history and tradition can get in the way of more accessible, contemporary symbolic language.

To rectify this, I think there should be a Buddhist-Christian Treadmill of Life.

Instead of the six worlds of the wheel, there would be two. There's the Top Tread, on which we run, which corresponds to Heaven/World of Gods. Then there's the Bottom Tread, which continually scrapes us like a belt sander, which corresponds to Hell. Nirvana might be knowing when and how to slow down and step off the treadmill. There might also be a connection to the waking and dreaming worlds, if I chose to take any of this seriously.

Contemplating this reveals the fundamental Buddha nature of the Jetsons. As George screams just as he passes from the Top Tread to the Bottom Tread: "Jane, stop this crazy thing!"

As some of you know, I've been living in Ohio for the last six weeks.

Watching everything that's going on here with people I know and love suggests to me that I'm nearing the convergence of an 11-year and a 12-year cycle, mainly around how I (mis)handle relationships.

I listened to Alan Watts earlier today (The Game of Hide and Seek), and his suggestion that we're responsible for everything that happens to us reveals that he didn't understand the word "responsibility" the same way Midwesterners do. The way he says it, "responsibility" seems to mean that we influence the development of the worlds around us, that by being who we are we are an integral part of the "workings" of the universe. To my Midwestern self, to be "responsible" is to entangle myself in the web of commitments I have made to people around me, and to face rebalancing in cases where I don't live up to my commitments. I suppose the second definition is more Judeo-Christian or artificially incentivized. The entanglement is more a product of my "mind", more of a deliberate choice than the inevitable causal give-and-take that happens in the first definition.

I thought for the last 10 years that I could let go of my stoic impulses. Now I know that they're here to stay, but how do I route around them when necessary?

From chat:

<dr.bez> i had one of the most amazing dreams of my life last night
<dr.bez> i had boarded a large spacecraft of some kind, and had time to explore
<dr.bez> then it took off for a nearby star, and i got to watch people doing stuff and look things up on a display
<dr.bez> i'm guessing that this is a prediction of some kind of video game that i will eventually play
<dr.bez> also the dream lasted for what felt like hours
<dr.bez> and contrary to [someone else]'s dream, the spacecraft was not made of beef brisket.

I wrote the following into a placemark for Marysville, Victoria, Australia:

I went here for one night during my Sep 1999 honeymoon. The people were friendly, and we had a nice dinner that night. The surrounding forest looked as if it had been made when the dinosaurs were still alive, with giant tree ferns as well as ash trees. I had a wonderful trip.

This town was wiped off the map by bushfires in February, 2009. At this writing (Feb 2009), arson is believed to have been the cause of the fires, which have likely killed over 100 people in Marysville.

I've been playing with a package called PureData (http://www.pure-data.info), a package for making music and processing signals. It's an open-source implementation of much of what was in a package called Max/MSP, which I remember playing with 20 years ago in the computer music lab back in college.

In the course of building some other things, I figured out how to grab an element from a list and display it. It feels like a "hello world" of sorts, except that I needed this functionality in order to build something else. So, here's the patch:



In text format (save to a file called something like 'test-packel.pd', then open it with PureData):

#N canvas 9 451 450 300 10;
#X floatatom 241 262 5 0 0 0 - - -;
#X floatatom 279 28 5 0 0 0 - - -;
#X msg 101 85 61 62 63 64 65 66 67;
#X obj 241 224 packel;
#X text 318 42 click here and drag;
#X text 318 54 up and down;
#X text 317 29 which element to get:;
#X text 152 101 the list from which;
#X text 152 114 to get an element;
#X connect 1 0 3 1;
#X connect 1 0 2 0;
#X connect 2 0 3 0;
#X connect 3 0 0 0;

I hope to have some more useful patches up in the near future.

EDIT: changed 'array' to 'list', because the word 'array' is meaningful in Pd.

From work chat:

12:34:16 PM: simran_: but I can't correct the corrupted data without access to cmgr15
12:34:41 PM: andrewr: before we talk about correcting, do we know how to fix and what got us into this mess?
12:34:48 PM: andrewr: at this point, I'm afraid of making things worse
12:35:22 PM: simran_: I'm guessing we can just set_dictionary_property()
12:35:35 PM: simran_: I don't know how we can achieve that level of corruption.
12:35:45 PM: simran_: I mean without congressional oversight and all.

After the House voted down the first attempt to bail out our financial sector, a lot of people are wondering about their futures. But this has all happened before, and will all happen again.

In a democracy, this is where the rubber meets the road. I think it's a foregone conclusion that a bailout will happen. Every Congresscritter is terrified to vote for this thing, because the angry constituent calls are overwhelmingly against doing this bailout. Every Congresscritter is terrified to vote against this thing, because the banking sector is telling them that there will be no more money if they vote against the bailout.

In the next round of this bailout, horsetrading for individual votes will begin in earnest. The next vote will be closer to passage than the vote recorded today. This process will continue until there is a bailout in place. It won't be perfect, and I'm not too happy about the idea of just handing over anywhere near that much money to anyone for any purpose. But I can see that it will happen.

We don't normally think about showing our politicians a little mercy, but now's the time like no other in our lifetimes to show it.

For my part, it turns out that Speaker Nancy Pelosi is my congressional representative. So, I thought I'd send her a message. But http://speaker.house.gov/contact/ is down, down, down, as you might suspect. So, I called Pelosi's local office in San Francisco just now. The operator asked me if i had a message to forward to the Speaker.

I said "Congratulations on all the work you've done so far. I imagine everyone in your office has gone a hundred hours without sleep. Let everyone go home and get the sleep they need, let them come back in when they're ready, then start round 2. Good luck."

If you are a direct constituent of Speaker Pelosi (i.e. if you live in her congressional district), please call (415) 556-4862 and say something similar.

Most of you are probably aware by now of the SEC's order on Friday temporarily banning the short sales of financial sector stocks. "Wall Streeter Barry Ritholtz tells Madeleine Brand that the SEC action reverses 1,000 years of theory about how free markets should work." The Death of Republican Philosophy illustrates the deep irony in what is going on. "Simply put, this week demonstrated how hollow many of the Republican values are. They sound great on paper, but aren't put into practice when that result might cause financial harm to another Republican."

My personal concern is that the people who got us into the current financial crisis may be rewarded for their management failures with a big government bailout. If a company failure puts the whole economy at risk, then there is a clear societal interest in regulating their behavior. I'm glad to see that even free-market enthusiasts are coming around to that realization.

I'd like to see some discussion about whether and how to regulate trading in derivatives. The JPM Derivatives Monster is a long, but informative, essay on derivatives and American governmental and banking sector exposure to them. A reader on a mailing list commented: "Back when it was written [on September 7, 2001], the authors expressed shock that the 1st Q of 2001 derivatives exposure was $44.6 trillion, with a US GDP of $10 trillion. As of the 1st Q of 2008, [total derivatives exposure is] $180.3 trillion."

Salon has published a detailed article about Sarah Palin's role in the environmental devastation in and around Wasilla, Alaska, while she was mayor there.

Rush Limbaugh alleges in a Wall Street Journal editorial that the Obama campaign is "stoking racial antagonism" in quoting his comments about "stupid and unskilled Mexicans". Salon concurs, in a way: "Limbaugh is absolutely right about one thing. He makes a convincing case that the Obama campaign used his words in a fundamentally dishonest way. In both cases, the quotes were pulled from segments in which Limbaugh was clearly being facetious. The rest of his Op-Ed, however, is patently ridiculous."

There was a discussion this morning on chat about government regulation and free markets. I noted that traffic signals are a kind of regulation imposed by government on personal behavior. Then I had an idea.

<DrTaurus> i can imagine some techno-libertarian doing away with traffic lights and replacing them with an "instant auction" system.
<DrTaurus> trading hubs at every intersection, with electronic transponders
<DrTaurus> put in your bids on your route ahead of time
<DrTaurus> i could design such a thing, really
<DrTaurus> it would allow motorcades to take highest priority, at highest cost
<DrTaurus> great moneymaker for the city
<DrTaurus> i ought to write up a proposal for the city of san francisco. that'll help boost tourism.
<DrTaurus> and reduce automobile usage
<DrTaurus> mmm, this is sounding better and better by the minute.

From chat:

<helper1> heh. In 2004, SEC exempted five firms from required capital/debt ratio regulations. They are: Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. 3 down, 2 to go.

<DrTaurus> i hope that with all this federal bailout money, that prosecutors will get involved in the financial circus
<DrTaurus> must be nice to be able to run a business where you can never lose money. federally guaranteed!

<helper2> Like a phone company
<DrTaurus> pretty much, helper2

<DrTaurus> maybe if i had followed my father's wishes and become a lawyer, i'd have been able to create a business like that
<DrTaurus> all that clean living damaged my future
<DrTaurus> if i had only gotten started on the truckload of drugs 15 years earlier.
<DrTaurus> but if that's my only regret, i think i'm doing well

I've decided to spend some time every few nights from now until Election Day, writing about this year's presidential election and other political topics. I'll be writing entries here in my blog, and welcome comments. I'll stay thoughtful and mostly respectful, though my decision to vote for Barack Obama is solid.

Let me know if you want me to read stuff that you find interesting, and if it's political in nature, I will post my feedback on it through the Days of Stupid commentaries.

Daily Kos has commissioned a daily tracking poll from a company called Research 2000 for this presidential election. This article talks about what they will and won't be doing with it. Daily Kos seems to want to encourage people to learn how to read and interpret polling data. (I am all for anything that will increase media literacy.)

Electoral-vote.com still shows Obama winning the electoral vote, though New Mexico has switched back to the Republicans. But fortunately, according to this map, he can win any one of Ohio, Virginia or New Mexico and get the electoral votes he needs for victory.

Please note at this site a story titled Polling and Partisan Identification. It explains some controversy surrounding the recent elevated poll numbers for McCain: partisan identification weighting. Apparently some recent polls assumed that there had to be a 50-50 split of Democratic and Republican voters in their survey. However, it's well-known that Democrats have far more voters registered with them than with the Republicans, so there's a real question of how genuine McCain's recent poll gains have been.

Also, Sarah Palin was teh fail tonight in an interview with Charles Gibson of ABC. He asked her what she thought of the Bush Doctrine, and she didn't answer the question. He had to remind her that the Bush Doctrine is the assertion that we have the right to attack any country that we think is planning to attack us. Palin also said that we could invade Russia under the right circumstances. I'm not making that up.

In the meantime, Chris Matthews and James Carville both claimed that John McCain could not have known about the recent attack ad by his campaign, claiming that Barack Obama supported sex education for kindergarteners. I don't share their optimism.

I hope that the Rapture happens sometime in the next few weeks. After all, someone has recently launched a service to care for all the pets abandoned after the Rapture takes place, so no harm will be done if it should actually happen. "I would imagine there will be a lot of pets that will be abandoned by Jesus the pet hater that will need to be cared for."

What you need:

• 1 bar "Fan" Laundry Soap, grated
  
• 1/2 cup washing soda
  
• 1/2 cup borax
  
• 2 tablespoons glycerin]
  
• 5 cups water
  

How to make:

• Mix soap with water, and heat on low until soap is dissolved (at least 10 minutes).
  
• Add washing soda and borax.
  
• Stir until everything is dissolved.
  
• Remove from heat.
  
• Put mix into a blender.
  
• Add glycerin.
  
• If you want, add any essential oil that you may want to use. (Examples: peppermint, lavender, sage, lemon)
  
• Blend well.

Makes 1/2 gallon, or 6 months' supply at 1.5 tsp/load. Double the recipe will fill a paint can with detergent. Works well with cold or warm water.

In San Francisco, here's where you can get the ingredients.

• The laundry soap is available at Kamei Housewares and Restaurant Supply, on Clement St at 6th Ave.


• The washing soda, borax, and glycerin are all in the same aisle at Rainbow Grocery, 1745 Folsom at Division St.

Thanks to Wendyanna Jones for this recipe.