fredcy

Hoax of the Century

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 13:24:13 -0500

In A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century, Jacob Siegel presents a history and analysis of recent “anti-disinformation” efforts in the U.S.

I’m skeptical about some of his conclusions but I appreciate the detailed history he presents and I’m increasingly concerned about efforts to control what we (the populace) think because (according to some powers that be) we can’t be trusted to think for ourselves.

The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule. The mobilization, which began as a response to the supposedly urgent menace of Russian interference, now evolves into a regime of total information control that has arrogated to itself the mission of eradicating abstract dangers such as error, injustice, and harm—a goal worthy only of leaders who believe themselves to be infallible, or comic-book supervillains.

If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind.

AI and Reflective Equilibrium

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 10:28:40 -0600

The proposals to combine neural networks with model and rule-based reasoning remind me of reflective equilibrium in political philosophy. In this metaphor, the case-based results of a neural network correspond to intuitions, and the models and associated rules correspond to explicit principles and beliefs.

In an AI system comprising both neural network and model/rule-based reasoning components, a management layer (with human intervention?) could perhaps intermediate and adjust the two components to strive for consistency between them (and perhaps self-consistency in the neural network part). The management component could look for patterns in the case-based results from the neural network side and create and adjust the model and rules to correspond. Similarly, the neural network weights and biases could be adjusted when the results differ from what is consistent with the model/rule side.

References

M. Mitchell and D. C. Krakauer, The Debate Over Understanding in AI’s Large Language Models, February 2023
Peter Norvig, On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
E. Bender, T. Gebru, A. McMillan-Major, S. Schmitchell, On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?, 2021
Elizabeth Weil, You Are Not a Parrot, Intelligencer, 2023

ChatGPT as search engine

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 10:21:02 -0600

I keep notes in text files using the Emacs Org-Mode, and I often search through those files using grep. I got thinking about a book I read years ago that, among other topics, discussed (near as I can recall) a note-taking application that allowed quick incremental searches through a large textual document. But I could not recall the author, so I asked ChatGPT using some sketchy criteria:

What is the name of the guy who died a few years ago who wrote about software user interface design? He proposed a personal journal application that allowed easy searching through one composite file.

ChatGPT immediately responded with the information I wanted:

The person you are referring to is Jef Raskin. He was a human-computer interface expert and the creator of the Macintosh computer project at Apple. He wrote a book titled “The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems” in which he discussed the principles of designing user interfaces for software applications. In the book, he also proposed a personal journal application called “The Humane Environment” which allowed easy searching through one composite file. Jef Raskin passed away in 2005.

The answer is spot on. Amazing.

Modern AI

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 12:22:05 -0600

I’m excited, and concerned, to see Artificial Intelligence become capable after so many years of failed promise. Back in the late 1970s I took a college¹ course surveyed the state of the art in AI. At that time there was very little practical application as the technology was weak and the hardware was limited. The course comprised only readings and we did not write or run any code.

In the 1990s I wrote a simple rule-based application intended to help software developers in a large organization² satisfy a set of process-management requirements. The rules were expressed in a declarative format much like a decision tree, and my program³ converted those rules to operational code in a simple survey dialog program. This was perhaps my favorite project in my career.

Not long after that I took a new job with a company that sold a development tool⁴ to generate applications using model-based reasoning with automated forward and backward-chaining over rules on an object-oriented framework. Sadly, that company pivoted almost immediately to an entirely different product space and they gave up any new development and most support of their model-based reasoning product.

Since then I’ve not worked on anything even AI-adjacent – to my regret. It was a shock then in 2017 to learn how AI technology had advanced to where AlphaGo⁵ was able to train itself to play Go at a world-master level in just a matter of days, simply by playing games against itself.

And now we have ChatGPT, Midjourney, and similar large language models proving capable of elaborate responses to simple prompts. The neural network architecture that was so long dimissed in the heydey of model-based reasoning has come back with a vengence, and the results are astounding.

University of Wisconsin - Madison ↩︎
AT&T Network Systems, Naperville Illinois ↩︎
Written in SML-NJ. ↩︎
Intellicorp’s Kappa. ↩︎
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/latest-ai-teaches-itself-play-games-no-human-help-180965322/ ↩︎

Tezos Tickets

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 12:00:00 -0500

Here my understanding of tickets in the Jarkarta protocol of the Tezos blockchain, from the perspective of a developer interested in working with tickets.

A ticket comprises a creator, a value, and an amount.

A ticket’s creator (or ticketer) is the address of the contract that created the ticket. Tickets are created only by the TICKET Michelson instruction in that smart contract’s code.

A ticket’s value is set by the creator when it creates the ticket, and cannot be changed later. Such a ticket value can be any comparable type in Michelson: int, string, bytes, etc.

A ticket’s amount, a nat value (non-negative integer) is also set by the creator, and cannot be changed later.

A ticket can be split into two tickets, each of which has the same creator and value (sometimes called the ticket key) as the original ticket and whose amounts sum to the amount of the original ticket. This consumes the original ticket and creates two tickets in its place.

Two tickets with the same creator and value (ticket key) can be joined into a single ticket whose amount is the sum of the amounts of the joined tickets. This consumes the two original tickets and creates a single ticket in their place.

A ticket can be interpreted as if it were a value that has been signed (or “stamped”) by its creator. A contract cannot create tickets with a creator other than itself. A contract knows that any tickets with itself as creator are ones that it created itself; they cannot be forged any other way.

A smart contract can pass a ticket to another contract as the parameter of a transaction or when creating that contract.

There is no special instruction for transferring tickets; instead they are passed as a contract call parameter as above.

Tickets cannot be copied. When passed from one contract to another, the sending contract no longer has that ticket and the receiving contract does.

Tickets exist only as explicit values in the storage of smart contracts (or on the stack when when executing Michelson code).

Said a different way, tickets do not exist as an implicit account balance the way that the tez balance of an account does. There is no accessible ledger (account table) in the chain context that defines the tickets owned by each account.¹

If a contract creates a ticket, for the ticket to persist the contract must either add the new ticket to its storage or pass it as parameter value to another contract; otherwise, the ticket is lost.

If a contract receives a ticket as a parameter, it must either add that ticket to its storage or pass it on to another contract; otherwise that ticket is lost.

Implicit accounts (those without smart contracts: tz1, tz2, tz3…) cannot create tickets, nor can they send or receive them. Only smart contract accounts (KT1…) can do that.²

Similarly, tickets cannot be created from outside of a smart contract, say from a dApp or the tezos-codec utility. There is no way to forge a ticket other than by a smart contract calling the TICKET instruction. Tickets can be passed from one contract to another, but not into the initial entry transaction into a contract.

My conclusions

There is no general way to create a “wallet” contract to receive, hold, and send arbitrary tickets sent to it. This is because there are an unbounded number of types of tickets (in terms of the Michelson type, such as ticket (pair int string), and each ticket type needs its own entrypoint and storage place to hold that ticket type.

A wallet for a single ticket type, such as ticket bytes, is feasible. The wallet contract could hold ticket values in a big_map (pair address bytes) (ticket bytes) where the big_map key is a ticket creator and content (bytes) value and the big_map value is the ticket joined from all received tickets with that key. ³

Questions

When happens when a JOIN_TICKET instruction call returns None, as in the cases where the input tickets do not share the same ticket key? Are the input tickets lost? Or does the code execution fail and retract such that the input tickets survice in the storage or in the caller (when passed as parameters)?
Similarly, what happens when a SPLIT_TICKET instruction call returns None, as when the requested amounts do not sum to the amount of the input ticket?

References

Tickets on Tezos: Brief whitepaper by Nomadic Labs

Tickets on Tezos — Part 1: Introduction to tickets on the Edo protocol, by TQ Tezos, Jan 2021.

Ticket-tutorials: Github repo with example Ligo Michelson code for tickets.

Operations on tickets: Tezos developer docs.

Contract signatures: Original discussion in Tezos Agora.

Tickets for dummies

Tickets: Summary of tickets by Nomadic Labs Knowledge Center.

There does seem to be “ticket-balance table” or “table of tickets” that Octez uses to validate that no tickets are being created improperly. And I have seen hints that this is also being used to hold ticket balances for implicit accounts. But this ticket table is not accessible by contact code or via RPC. Source, anyone? ↩︎
Again, this might not be correct given work done to support TORU. Sources, anyone? ↩︎
Looks like the contract for the Deku bridge does something like that. ↩︎

Default ACL in Tezos v10.1

Sat, 07 Aug 2021 08:30:00 -0500

TL;DR: Configure the tezos-node RPC port with --rpc-addr localhost:8732 rather than (or in addition to, if providing remote RPC access) --rpc-addr :8732

Default ACL for RPC

The v10.1 release of the Octez software adds a new default ACL for RPC feature, and the way it works is subtle.

If the listening address resolves to the loopback network interface, then full access to all endpoints is granted

If the listening address is a network address, then a more restrictive policy applies.

The upshot of these is that specifying the node’s RPC listening address as :8732 – as it does not explicitly mention localhost or 127.0.0.1 – is treated as the network address case and the restrictive default policy applies, even when the client is connecting to localhost. The baker and endorser clients connect to localhost:8732 by default and are thus blocked by the default restrictive policy, resulting in messages that include:

error: The server doesn't authorize this endpoint (ACL filtering).

What to do if you get the ACL error

If your node’s RPC is not accessed from outside the server, then you probably want to restrict the RPC port to listen only on localhost (or, equivalently, 127.0.0.1)

If you manage your node’s config file you can do this and restart tezos-node:

tezos-node config update --rpc-addr localhost:8732

If you use the default config file, setting options on the run command line, then you could start tezos-node this way:

tezos-node run --rpc-addr localhost:8732 ...other options here...

If your node’s RPC is accessed remotely then (per Pierre Boutillier) you probably want to set up two RPC listeners, one for localhost and one for remote access. For the latter you will probably want to set up explicit ACL rules to allow/deny specific RPCs to protect the node (which is beyond the scope of this posting). The --rpc-addr option can be specified multiple times to tezos-node run or tezos-node config update to specify multiple listeners:

... --rpc-addr localhost:8732 --rpc-addr :8732

A quick and insecure way to allow all RPCs for remote access is by adding the --allow-all-rpc :8732 option to the above.

Alternative explanation

Here is how Pierre Boutillier puts it on the Baking Slack (lightly edited by me):

If you configured --rpc-addr to something else than localhost:... and want to do something forbidden by the ACL, you have two possibilities:

if your baker/endorser/accusser/client/… is actually on the same machine, add an extra --rpc-addr localhost:... in addition of your old --rpc-addr and use localhost as the target of your RPCs. This configuration is safe (as long as access on your machine is secured)
if not; use --allow-all-rpc [XXX] with [XXX] being the exact same string as what you put as --rpc-addr argument. This configuration may not be safe.

Building Tezos 8.0

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 14:23:05 -0600

Building and running Tezos version 8.0 on an Ubuntu 18.04 system was a bit more complicated than usual. Here is a build procedure that works.

Install rust

Follow the directions at http://tezos.gitlab.io/introduction/howtoget.html#install-rust. This only needs to be done once on any given build machine.

Get the version 8.0 code

Assuming one already has the ’latest-release’ branch checked out, just do the usual

git pull

Start the build as usual

make build-deps

This will work for a while and then fail with a message about “fatal: unknown value for config ‘protocol.version’: 2”.

Patch the git problem (Ubuntu 18.04 only)

Run the following from the top of the build directory:

git -C _build_rust/opam-repository config --local protocol.version 1

Note that we can’t apply this patch until we’ve run make build-deps at least once as it depends on files created by that step.

Continue the build as usual

make build-deps
eval $(opam env)
make

This time the build-deps step should finish without error.

Running the node

The tezos-node service now needs to access some Zcash parameters at runtime, and if it can’t it will fail with a message about “Failed to initialize Zcash parameters”.

Option 1: One workaround is to run eval $(opam env) from the build directory before running tezos-node.

Option 2: For running tezos-node via systemctl I found that setting the OPAM_SWITCH_PREFIX environment variable to the same value set as by opam env suffices.

diff -r cea309c135b3 systemd/system/tezos-node.service
--- a/systemd/system/tezos-node.service Tue Dec 22 13:54:50 2020 -0600
+++ b/systemd/system/tezos-node.service Tue Dec 22 14:11:02 2020 -0600
@@ -12,6 +12,7 @@
 Group          = fred
 WorkingDirectory= /home/fred/
 ExecStart      = /home/fred/bin-main/tezos-node run
+Environment    = "OPAM_SWITCH_PREFIX=/home/fred/tezos/_opam"
 Restart         = on-failure
 TimeoutSec     = 600
 FinalKillSignal        = SIGQUIT

Option 3: Perhaps the best option is to install the Zcash parameters independently from the build directory. This is described at https://tezos.gitlab.io/introduction/howtoget.html#install-rust where it recommends downloading and running https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zcash/zcash/master/zcutil/fetch-params.sh. This does result in about 740MB of data in ~/.zcash-params. The tezos-node runtime automatically finds the Zcash parameters there.

Credits

Thanks to Romain Bardou for some corrections to what I originally wrote here.

COVID-19 Info

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 08:38:06 -0500

Here are some sources I’ve found useful and which seem reliable.

91-divoc
Trajectory of cases, by state
Rt Covid-19
Interactive visualization from John Hopkins data
Worldometer: global
Worldometer: US
Johns Hopkins map
Financial Times tracker (incorporates some of the above)
COVID-19 projections
The Peter Attia Drive Postcast

(The CDC seems to have stopped incorporating state data into its totals starting about March 16, so I don’t find their data useful.)

Analyses

The case for cautious optimism about the pandemic, Matthew Walker, The Week, March 31

Web Sign-In

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 11:16:47 -0600

Yesterday I got web sign in working with this site. With that I’m able to login to indieweb.org via github.com, which is currently the only supported web-sign-in method for the sites that I’ve connected with (per the links on the page footer here).

I’ve also got this site connected to webmention.io which I think will collect and store any cases where other similar sites might link to pages on this site. Eventually I’d like to have full WebMention support on this site, similar to what’s described at IndieWebify Your Hugo Website.

IndieWeb

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 10:58:20 -0600

This site is an experiment using the IndieWeb approach to posting web content and connecting with other similar sites. I’m building the site with Hugo, and with that the Indigo theme that is designed to support IndieWeb.

Building Tezos on Ubuntu 14.04

Wed, 23 Nov 2016 17:46:37 +0000

Install opam and ocaml utilities. At this time this results in opam version 1.2.2 and ocaml 4.02.3.

add-apt-repository ppa:avsm/ppa
apt-get update
apt-get install ocaml ocaml-native-compilers camlp4-extra opam

Add repo needed for libsodium-dev (at least) that the Tezos installation scripts will install.

add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
apt-get update

Switch to Ocaml 4.03.0. [update: using 4.04.2 on 2017/09/05]

opam init
opam switch 4.03.0
eval `opam config env`

Clone the tezos source repo to /opt/tezos.

Build dependencies per https://github.com/tezos/tezos

cd /opt/tezos
make build-deps

Install additional dependency manually. [update: no longer seems to be needed on 2017/09/05]

opam install irmin.0.11.1

Build Tezos binaries.

make

Addendum

Thanks to @arthurb on the Tezos slack and to the folks on the #ocaml IRC list for all the help.

When I ran into trouble and had to start from near scratch, here are the (drastic) steps. (I don’t have other Ocaml projects, yet).

rm -r $HOME/.opam
cd /opt/tezos
git clean -dxf

Then start again at opam init.

Virtue via intelligence

Wed, 18 May 2016 22:45:00 +0000

The evils of the world are due to moral defects quite as much as to lack of intelligence. But the human race has not hitherto discovered any method of eradicating moral defects; preaching and exhortation only add hypocrisy to the previous list of vices. Intelligence, on the contrary, is easily improved by methods known to every competent educator. Therefore, until some method of teaching virtue has been discovered, progress will have to be sought by improvement of intelligence rather than of morals.

-Bertrand Russell

The Will to Doubt: Bertrand Russell on Free Thought and Our Only Effective Self-Defense Against Propaganda

The Stoic: 9 Principles to Help You Keep Calm in Chaos – 99U

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 17:28:13 +0000

The Stoic: 9 Principles to Help You Keep Calm in Chaos – 99U.

How to Get Yourself to Do Things

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 17:27:12 +0000

You finish a thing by starting it until it’s done

via How to Get Yourself to Do Things.

Costs of Financial Innovation

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 17:24:15 +0000

In “Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting”, the author argues that the liquidity brought by modern finance is not a good thing.

By enabling the consumer to instantaneously borrow against illiquid assets, financial innovation eliminates the possibility for partial commitment. This has two effects on the welfare of the current self. First, the current self no longer faces a self-imposed liquidity constraint and can therefore consume more in its period of control. Second, future selves are also no longer liquidity constrained and may also consume at a higher rate out of the wealth stock that they inherit. The first effect makes the current self better off. The second effect makes the current self worse off (since the current self would like to constrain the consumption of future selves).

Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting, David Laibson, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 112, No. 2, In Memory of Amos Tversky (1937-1996) (May, 1997) , pp. 443-477.

Committing to choices

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 16:37:23 +0000

In Resolving to Create a New You Ruth Chang argues that in making choices between alternatives that are on par (have much the same value to us) we should favor the choice that we can most fully commit to.

Instead of being led by the nose by what we imagine to be facts of the world, we should instead recognize that sometimes the world is silent about what we should do. In those cases, we can create value for ourselves by committing to an option. By doing so, we not only create value for ourselves but we also (re)create ourselves.

Breakdown of Will

Tue, 09 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In the book Breakdown of Will author George Ainslie presents a theory of decision-making where relative preferences for possible alternative outcomes vary over time, unlike the usual “rational” model where relative preferences remain consistent. His model is based on hyperbolic discounting where the value of a future pay-off is discounted more heavily than normal exponential discounting in the period near the pay-off time and less heavily in the long tail well before the pay-off.

Here are some excerpts from the book, organized by the parts and chapters of the book.

Part 1. Breakdowns of Will: The Puzzle of Akrasia

Introduction

We make irrational choices in the moment that go against our long term interests. Why? Modern psychology avoids talking about willpower. Aristotle talked about akrasia, “weakness of will”. The self is seen to use reason to counter the demands of passion.

The human bent for defeating our own plans has puzzled writers since antiquity. From Plato’s idea that the better part of the self — reason — could be overwhelmed by passion, there evolved the concept of a faculty, will, that lent reason the kind of force that could confront passion and defeat it. The construct of the will and its power became unfashionable in twentieth-century science, but the puzzle of self-defeating behavior — what Aristotle called akrasia — and its sometime control has not been solved. With the help of new experimental findings and conceptual tools from several different disciplines, it will be possible to form a hypothesis about the nature of will that does not violate the conventions of science as we know it.

Ch 2: The Dichotomy at the Root of Decision Science: Do We Make Choices By Desires or By Judgements?

The puzzle of self-defeating behavior has provoked two kinds of explanation, neither of which has been adequate. Cognitive theories have stayed close to introspective experiences of the will and its failure but have shrunk from systematic causal hypotheses, perhaps because they make a person seem too mechanical. Utility-based theories have accounted well for many properties of choice, but seem to predict neither self-defeating behavior nor any faculty to prevent it. Hypotheses to reconcile self-defeating behavior with maximization of utility have cited naiveté, short time horizons, conditioned cravings, and the physiological nature of reward, but all of these explanations have failed on experimental or logical grounds.

The Internet of Things (Watching Us)

Wed, 26 Nov 2014 16:14:28 +0000

The Creepy New Wave of the Internet by Sue Halpern | The New York Review of Books.

The Internet of Things Watching Us is coming. I can’t see the efficiency being worth the loss of privacy in most cases. But I carry a tracker (cell phone) around like most everyone else anyway, so I know this can sneak in eventually and seem OK.

Memorization and Repetition Still Needed for Learning

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 00:03:05 +0000

I believe in learning for understanding, critical thinking, and inquiry-based learning. But even so, real fluency still requires some drill-and-kill.

The problem with focusing relentlessly on understanding is that math and science students can often grasp essentials of an important idea, but this understanding can quickly slip away without consolidation through practice and repetition. Worse, students often believe they understand something when, in fact, they don’t.

via How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math – Issue 17: Big Bangs – Nautilus.

Time after time, professors in mathematics and the sciences have told me that building well-ingrained chunks of expertise through practice and repetition was absolutely vital to their success. Understanding doesn’t build fluency; instead, fluency builds understanding. In fact, I believe that true understanding of a complex subject comes only from fluency.

Managing WordPress via git

Fri, 03 Oct 2014 14:31:15 +0000

I reorganized my self-hosted WordPress system to use git to manage the WordPress code and to move the content outside of the WordPress directory. That way I should be able to do a simple git pull and git checkout $newversion to update my WordPress. I’m also keeping my content directory under change management (separately) so that I can update plugins through the web and be able to roll back.

$HOME/blog/wordpress is a git clone of git@github.com:WordPress/WordPress.git. I make no local changes in this. In particular, all of wp-content is unchanged (I make it unwriteable by Apache to be sure).
$HOME/blog/content is a copy of the wp-content of my site (prior to moving it outside the wordpress code). It contains the usual: plugins, themes, uploads. It’s all writeable by Apache so that I can update plugins and themes through the web.
$HOME/blog/wp-config.php is the usual config file (WordPress looks in the parent directory for it). It’s standard except for two settings:
```
define('WP_CONTENT_DIR', '/home/fred/blog/content');  
define('WP_CONTENT_URL', 'http://fred.yankowski.com/content');
```
/etc/apache2/conf.d/wordpress.conf defines the VirtualHost for the wordpress site. It has an alias to support special location of the content. (It also has the mod_rewrite rules for permalinks so that I don’t need an .htaccess file in the wordpress code).
```
DocumentRoot /home/fred/blog/wordpress
Alias /content /home/fred/blog/content
```

Can’t be understated

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:58:04 +0000

According to FirstRead,

the Iraq war’s effect on American politics can’t be understated, even 10 years later

So, according to that, anything that can be said is overstating the effect. One can’t state anything less about the effect.

Of course, they mean “should not be understated” rather than “can’t be understated”. But they could probably care less.

Google Reader, RIP

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:30:38 +0000

Google just announced that Reader will be unavailable as of July 1. Damn!

This makes me think that I should never rely on Google products for anything important. Docs, calendar, etc. Time to start looking for alternatives to each.

Perfect health diet

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 23:42:45 +0000

For the last month I’ve been trying the Perfect Health Diet and I’m pleased. My weight has remained low where it had dropped when I was sick. My strength is mostly back to where it was before I fell ill. It feels like my energy level is improved and my attention span is perhaps better than it was.

At first the name of the diet seemed pretentious but I get that it’s a play on how the authors, a husband and wife team, both have PhDs. Their book is clearly written and presents a convincing case for the benefits of their diet plan. I came to it via the Paleo book by Rob Wolf, which also makes a good case but puts me off with its sophomoric writing.

Making better decisions

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:41:42 +0000

New Scientist mag has a May 2007 article on “Top 10 ways to make better decisions“. Here is what I got from it.

Don’t fear the consequences
> Rather than looking inwards and imagining how a given outcome might make you feel, try to find someone who has made the same decision or choice, and see how they felt. Remember also that whatever the future holds, it will probably hurt or please you less than you imagine. Finally, don’t always play it safe. The worst might never happen – and if it does you have the psychological resilience to cope.
Go with your gut instincts
> faced with a simple choice, subjects picked better cars if they could think things through. When confronted by a complex decision, however, they became bamboozled and actually made the best choices when they did not consciously analyse the options.
- Consider your emotions
  This is a difficult one. Experiments show that people disconnected from their emotions due to neural damage have trouble making even basic decisions. On the other hand, anger and disgust can affect choices where the situation is unrelated to what triggered the emotion.
- Play the devil’s advocate
  Work against the “confirmation bias”, our tendency to ignore evidence that goes against our opinions. Or at least recognize that the bias exists.
- Keep your eye on the ball
  
  Our decisions and judgements have a strange and disconcerting habit of becoming attached to arbitrary or irrelevant facts and figures.
  
  Buying something because of a discounted “sale price” is an example. Only the price should really matter, not how much it is supposedly discounted.

(Via a blog post by Kol Tregaskes.)

blogging

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:06:34 +0000

This blog has languished. I tend to put more stuff on Facebook these days (http://www.facebook.com/fredcy).

Predicting happiness when making choices

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 20:44:59 +0000

From “Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth” by Diener and Biswas-Diener, 2008:

There are several predictable thinking errors people commonly make that lead them to incorrectly predict their own future emotions in general, and future happiness in particular:

Focusing on a single salient feature or period of time in a choice, rather than looking at the big picture.

Overestimating the long-term impact of our choices.

Forgetting that happiness is an ongoing process, not a destination

Paying too much attention to external information while overlooking personal preferences and experience.

Trying to maximize decisions rather than focusing on personal satisfaction.

Confusing wanting something for liking it later, and forgetting to evaluate whether we will enjoy the choice once its novelty wears off.

The good news is that by identifying these errors and learning about why they occur, we can guard against them. We may never be able to overcome them entirely, but we certainly can reduce their impact on our lives. By considering a wide range of information, by remembering our ability to cope and adapt, by tapping personal experience, and by remembering that happiness is an ongoing process, you will be far more likely to make decisions that will make you optimally happy. To make good happiness forecasts, get some experience when you can, and check with others who have had similar experiences to the one you will have. Focus on the entire picture, not just on some salient aspect of it, and think what it will be like after a year, not just during the initial period when things may be either more stressful or more exciting. By becoming a good happiness forecaster, through practice and experience, you will substantially increase your psychological wealth.

Your brain is like a pile of sand

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:09:42 +0000

From Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain

your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.

systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of “self-organised criticality“. These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour – such as a swinging pendulum – and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.

experiments have confirmed that these models accurately describe what real brain tissue does. They build on the observation that when a single neuron fires, it can trigger its neighbours to fire too, causing a cascade or avalanche of activity that can propagate across small networks of brain cells. This results in alternating periods of quiescence and activity – remarkably like the build-up and collapse of a sand pile.

Work that can’t be done over the wire

Thu, 21 May 2009 17:29:41 +0000

From Heidegger and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

[According to Princeton economist Alan Blinder] the labor market of the next decades won’t necessarily be divided between the highly educated and the less-educated: “The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via wireless connections) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not.” Binder goes on to summarize his own take: “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Learning a trade is not limiting but, rather, liberating. If you are in possession of a skill that cannot be exported overseas, done with an algorithm, or downloaded, you will always stand a decent chance of finding work. Even rarer, you will probably be a master of your own domain, something the thousands of employed but bored people in the service industries can only dream of.

Working over the internet is freeing because you can do it from anywhere, but the flip-side is that you are then in competition with the entire world

Distraction and Attention

Wed, 20 May 2009 14:54:26 +0000

From In Defense of Distraction:

“Where you allow your attention to go ultimately says more about you as a human being than anything that you put in your mission statement,” [Merlin Mann] continues. “It’s an indisputable receipt for your existence. And if you allow that to be squandered by other people who are as bored as you are, it’s gonna say a lot about who you are as a person.”

Positive emotions make us more vulnerable

Tue, 12 May 2009 15:26:11 +0000

From What Makes Us Happy?:

… positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

Then there is this (emphasis mine):

When Vaillant told me he was going to speak to Seligman’s class, he said his message would be from William Blake: “Joy and woe are woven fine.” Earlier in his career, he would use such occasions to demonstrate, with stories and data, the bright side of pain—how adaptations can allow us to turn dross into gold. Now he articulates the dark side of pleasure and connection—or, at least, the way that our most profound yearnings can arise from our most basic fears.

Self-control via strategic allocation of attention

Mon, 11 May 2009 14:25:10 +0000

From Don’t in the New Yorker:

What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten.

Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.

… this is how self-control “cashes out” in the real world: as an ability to direct the spotlight of attention so that our decisions aren’t determined by the wrong thoughts.

Calendar as information central

Fri, 08 May 2009 18:22:02 +0000

I think Scott Adams is right, “the biggest software revolution of the future is that the calendar will be the organizing filter for most of the information flowing into your life”. Sharing calendars is still too hard, and when we solve that problem I expect it to be hugely useful. I expected shared calendar technology to become mainstream years ago and it still hasn’t happened. Just what is the roadblock?

Tired, or energized?

Mon, 04 May 2009 20:39:29 +0000

From an essay by Milton Glaser:

“… there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.”

Yet more on DFW

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:17:23 +0000

From The Unfinished in The New Yorker:

The central issue for Wallace remained, as he told McCaffery, how to give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” He added, “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”

The novel continues Wallace’s preoccupation with mindfulness. It is about being in the moment and paying attention to the things that matter, and centers on a group of several dozen I.R.S. agents working in the Midwest. Their job is tedious, but dullness, “The Pale King” suggests, ultimately sets them free. A typed note that Wallace left in his papers laid out the novel’s idea: “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”

Welfare for grifters and marks

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:45:42 +0000

From Foreclosures Are Not the Problem. Those Who Build Financial Time Bombs, and Those Who Pick Them Up, Are the Problem on Angry Bear [emphasis added]:

But the real problem, the cause of this whole mess, is simple: every few decades, our economic system morphs into a structure that rewards making things less than it rewards creating financial time bombs with multi-year fuses. We’ve been rewarding the financial time bomb makers more and more since Reagan took office. And this is also the second time since Reagan took office we’ve been bailing out the financial time bomb makers at great cost to the rest of us – the previous time was during the S&L crisis.

Things have now evolved to the point where for some reason, when the market for time bombs disappears its considered some sort of a tragedy. This time around, we’ve already helped out the grifters, including many investment banks, commercial banks, derivatives traders, and now we’ve moved on to helping the marks. And rewarding any of them, the grifters or the marks, is a problem for several reasons. It rewards the bad behavior of the financial time bomb makers and reduces the incentives the rest of us have to watch out for the crooks. (And yes, I know, people living next to foreclosed homes suffer too. But externalities come in both positive and negative varieties, and folks who benefited from home prices rising for no reason don’t have a complaint when the home prices drop back in value because people found out the rise happened shouldn’t have happened in the first place.) It also keeps an unviable system going, and it does so at great cost.

But there’s one more thing. Since this whole thought process, this current iteration of the art of rewarding of the financial time bomb makers, dates back to Reagan, it pays to go back to Reagan… And when Reagan conjured up images of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen, it pissed people off not because there were people who needed help, but because supposedly many people who were getting help were, according Reagan, living better than the people being taxed to help them. And while I for one have never had a problem with seeing some of my tax money go toward helping the unfortunate, and I’ve never had a problem with welfare, at this moment in time, I know with absolute certainty that more most of the new-fangled welfare from the last six months is directed to helping people who are better off than I or have lived much better than I in recent years (investment banks, commercial banks, derivatives traders, and now homeowners) than the poor. I resent it. Does Obama really want a country where the folks who make and pick up time bombs are rewarded at the expense of those who are too honest to make time bombs or were smart enough (and in some cases, lucky enough) not to pick them up?

What DFW wanted his writing to do

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:04:21 +0000

Here is an excerpt from “Looking for a Garde of Which to be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace” as it appeared in the Spring 1993 issue of Whiskey Island magazine published by Cleveland State University.

But there are a few books I have read that I’ve never been the same after, and I think all good writing somehow addresses the concern of and acts as an anodyne against loneliness. We’re all terribly, terribly lonely. And there’s a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can’t be in the real world. I don’t know what you’re thinking. I don’t know that much about you as I don’t know that much about my parents or my lover or my sister, but a piece of fiction that’s really true allows you to be intimate with …. I don’t want to say people, but it allows you to be intimate with a world that resembles our own in enough emotional particulars so that the way different things must feel is carried out with us into the real world. I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely. Or really to affect people.

Trust depends on emotions

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:12:37 +0000

The emotional states inside us are very, very real and the product of biological evolution. They are helpful to us in our attempt to survive. Experimental economics and behavioral sciences have recently shown us how important they are to us as social creatures: To cooperate you have to trust the other party, even though a rational analysis will tell you that both the likelihood and the cost of being cheated is very high. When you trust, you experience a physiologically detectable inner glow of pleasure. So the inner emotional state says yes. However, if you rationally consider the objects in the outside world, the other parties, and consider their trade-offs and motives, you ought to choose not to cooperate. Analyzing the outside world makes you say no. Human cooperation is dependent on our giving weight to what we experience as the inner world compared to what we experience as the outer world.

INSIDE OUT: THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF EVERYTHING, by TOR NØRRETRANDERS

DFW is dead — long live DFW

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:48:04 +0000

David Foster Wallace is dead, reportedly a suicide. Damn. His writing is some of the most powerful stuff I’ve ever read, very frustrating and yet giving and instilling a difference perspective on things.

Here’s a quote from a commencement address that he gave. It’s not really representative of what I’ve read from him, but gives some insight into what mattered to him and what, ultimately, may have done him in.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

from David Foster Wallace – Commencement speech at Kenyon University

“Least Common Denominator” should be Greatest Common Divisor

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:37:32 +0000

Many people use the phrase least common denominator to describe something as being base or common. It connotes something that appeals to most people, something that we all value. It is the intersection of what we all value, in the set-theory sense. But in arithmetic the LCD is the union of the prime factors of the denominators (including the multiplicity of those factors).

Perhaps greatest common divisor is a better metaphor for what is typically described as an LCD, the GCD being the intersection of prime factors.

upgrading WordPress, or how to turn 30 minutes into several hours

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 03:04:09 +0000

It took maybe 30 minutes to upgrade from WordPress 2.2 to 2.6, including time to revisit my notes on how I’ve done it before and to scan the official install/upgrade notes. But then it took a couple of hours to figure out why categories were gone and how to fix it. Long story short, I had to manually build the wp_terms table rows based on the old wp_categories rows. The SQL given in a forum note, lost categories after 2.6 upgrade, did the trick. But what a waste of time.

Thoughts on a Station Platform

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:24:43 +0000

“It ought to be plain
how little you gain
by getting excited
and vexed.
You’ll always be late
for the previous train,
and always in time
for the next.”
-Piet Hein

Investment strategy by Nicholas Taleb

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:05:15 +0000

A Times Online interview with Nicholas Taleb includes this one-paragraph bit of investment advice:

[T]he good investment strategy is to put 90% of your money in the safest possible government securities and the remaining 10% in a large number of high-risk ventures. This insulates you from bad black swans and exposes you to the possibility of good ones. Your smallest investment could go “convex” – explode – and make you rich. High-tech companies are the best. The downside risk is low if you get in at the start and the upside very high. Banks are the worst – all the risk is downside. Don’t be tempted to play the stock market – “If people knew the risks they’d never invest.”

The Spacing Effect in Learning

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:01:39 +0000

The spacing effect: it’s possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. The idea is to rehearse (restudy) when the likelihood of recall drops to certain point. Repeating this flattens the “forgetting curve” (likelihood of successfull recall over time).

Long-term memory, the Bjorks said, can be characterized by two components, which they named retrieval strength and storage strength. Retrieval strength measures how likely you are to recall something right now, how close it is to the surface of your mind. Storage strength measures how deeply the memory is rooted. Some memories may have high storage strength but low retrieval strength. Take an old address or phone number. Try to think of it; you may feel that it’s gone. But a single reminder could be enough to restore it for months or years. Conversely, some memories have high retrieval strength but low storage strength. Perhaps you’ve recently been told the names of the children of a new acquaintance. At this moment they may be easily accessible, but they are likely to be utterly forgotten in a few days, and a single repetition a month from now won’t do much to strengthen them at all.

The Bjorks were not the first psychologists to make this distinction, but they and a series of collaborators used a broad range of experimental data to show how these laws of memory wreak havoc on students and teachers. One of the problems is that the amount of storage strength you gain from practice is inversely correlated with the current retrieval strength. In other words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal we’re learning well — easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something — are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future. “The most motivated and innovative teachers, to the extent they take current performance as their guide, are going to do the wrong things,” Robert Bjork says. “It’s almost sinister.”

The best time to study something is at the moment you are about to forget it.

I find myself thinking of a checklist Wozniak wrote a few years ago describing how to become a genius. His advice was straightforward yet strangely terrible: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired.

Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

Purpose of consciousness

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:30:19 +0000

Nicholas Humphrey writes about Questioning Consciousness and concludes with this. Concerning the purpose of consciousness, given that it seems not to be essential to anything we do (according to him), he says:

I think the plain and simple fact is that consciousness—on various levels—makes life more worth living.
We like being phenomenally conscious. We like the world in which we’re phenomenally conscious. We like ourselves for being phenomenally conscious. And the resulting joie de vivre, the enchantment with the world we live in, and the enhanced sense of our own metaphysical importance have, in the course of evolutionary history, turned our lives around.

Learn and Help Learn

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 23:55:04 +0000

Here is some good stuff from the closing section of the Mindsets book by Carol Dweck:
“When people change to a growth mindset, they change from a judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework.
Every day presents you with ways to grow and to help the people you care about grow. How can you remember to look for these chances? Each morning, as you contemplate the day in front of you, try to ask yourself these questions.

What are the opportunities for learning and growth today? For myself? For the people around me?

As you think of opportunities, form a plan, and ask:

When, where and how will I embark on my plan?

When, where, and how make the plan concrete.
As you encounter the inevitable obstacles and setbacks, form a new plan and ask yourself the question again:

When, where and how will I act on my new plan?

Regardless of how bad you may feel, do it!
And when you succeed, don’t forget to ask yourself:

What do I have to do to maintain and continue the growth?

Cognitive dissonance

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:34:40 +0000

The following appears in a blog entry about the bear market (emphasis mine):

“People tend to ignore, reject or minimize any information that conflicts with their positive self-image,” their preconceived ideas and their ideological convictions, says John Nofsinger, Washington State professor of behavioral finance, in “Investment Madness.”
“The avoidance of cognitive dissonance can affect the decision-making processes in two ways. First, you can fail to make important decisions because it’s too uncomfortable to contemplate the situation,” Nofsinger says.
People hate conflicting data so much they get nervous when their preconceptions are threatened. Their brain freezes, they self-sabotage and do nothing–and their worst fears become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The second way we handle conflicting information: “Your brain will filter out or reduce negative information and fixate on positive information,” Nofsinger says. Unfortunately, “if you ignore negative information, how are you going to realize that an adjustment in your portfolio is necessary?” Plus, you miss lots of opportunities.

Focus on effort, not talent

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:55:53 +0000

A recent article in Scientific American Mind, The Secret to Raising Smart Kids, discusses research suggesting that it is better to praise kids for their effort than to praise them for being smart. Here are some quotes:

Hint: Don’t tell your kids that they are [smart]. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort—not on intelligence or ability—is key to success in school and in life

teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.

the most persistent students do not ruminate about their own failure much at all but instead think of mistakes as problems to be solved.

How do we transmit a growth mind-set to our children? One way is by telling stories about achievements that result from hard work.

students praised for their effort did not lose confidence when faced with the harder questions, and their performance improved markedly on the easier problems that followed.

parents and teachers can help children by providing explicit instruction regarding the mind as a learning machine.

Teaching children such information is not just a ploy to get them to study. People do differ in intelligence, talent and ability. And yet research is converging on the conclusion that great accomplishment, and even what we call genius, is typically the result of years of passion and dedication and not something that flows naturally from a gift. Mozart, Edison, Curie, Darwin and Cézanne were not simply born with talent; they cultivated it through tremendous and sustained effort. Similarly, hard work and discipline contribute much more to school achievement than IQ does.

Such lessons apply to almost every human endeavor. For instance, many young athletes value talent more than hard work and have consequently become unteachable. Similarly, many people accomplish little in their jobs without constant praise and encouragement to maintain their motivation. If we foster a growth mind-set in our homes and schools, however, we will give our children the tools to succeed in their pursuits and to become responsible employees and citizens.

Robert Shiller on the housing boom/bust

Sat, 08 Sep 2007 18:58:54 +0000

Robert Shiller considers causes of the recent housing boom, and possible bust.

In this paper, I will consider, from a broad perspective, the possible causes of this boom, with particular attention to speculative thinking among investors. I will argue that a significant factor in this boom was a widespread perception that houses are a great investment, and the boom psychology that helped spread such thinking. In arguing this, I will make some reliance on the emerging field of behavioral economics. This field has appeared in the last two decades as a reaction against the strong prejudice in the academic profession against those who interpret price behavior as having a psychological component. The profession had come to regard all markets as efficient, and to reject those who say otherwise. Now, however, behavioral economics is increasingly recognized, and has developed a substantial accumulation of literature that we can use to give new concreteness to ideas about psychology in economics.

Spinoza’s freedom

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:32:53 +0000

Spinoza was a thoroughgoing determinist who held that absolutely everything that happens occurs through the operation of necessity. For him, even human behaviour is fully determined, with freedom being our capacity to know we are determined and to understand why we act as we do. So freedom is not the possibility to say “no” to what happens to us but the possibility to say “yes” and fully understand why things should necessarily happen that way. By forming more “adequate” ideas about what we do and our emotions or affections, we become the adequate cause of our effects (internal or external), which entails an increase in activity (versus passivity). This means that we become both more free and more like God, as Spinoza argues in the Scholium to Prop. 49, Part II. However, Spinoza also held that everything must necessarily happen the way that it does. Therefore, there is no free will.

From the wikipedia entry for Baruch Spinoza.
[emphasis mine]

Confidence

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:04:46 +0000

As the plane begins its descent to LaGuardia, Trudeau remembers something interesting, something from his teens, when he had a summer job working at Time magazine.

“As I was walking out the building one day on my lunch break, two-thirds of a block away this spectacularly beautiful young woman in a very short miniskirt was walking toward me . . .”

Not sure where this is going, but I’m taking notes as fast as I can.

“She was in her early twenties. I was 16 and looked all of 12. You could feel it in the air, her coming at you. Her presence was destabilizing the street for a one-block radius. Guys were gawking, cars were slowing. This woman was a menace. She was walking in a confident way, with a swing to her hips. I was geeky and shy, too shy to make eye contact. I wouldn’t even have known what to DO with eye contact. My discomfort must have been obvious because, as she passes me, she leans over, her breath is warm, and she softly . . . growls in my ear.”

Wow.

“I thought to myself: I’ve just been handed the most extraordinary gift. She showed such wisdom, with such a generous use of power. She just changed the life of a young boy. I thought , Anything is possible.”

Doonesbury’s War

Startups

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:15:56 +0000

Paul Graham writes on Why to Not Not Start a Startup. Given his success with supporting projects at Y Combinator, his perspective is valuable. His essay presents a case against reasons that he has heard for not creating a startup company.

So here’s the brief recipe for getting startup ideas. Find something that’s missing in your own life, and supply that need—no matter how specific to you it seems. Steve Wozniak built himself a computer; who knew so many other people would want them? A need that’s narrow but genuine is a better starting point that one that’s broad but hypothetical. So even if the problem is simply that you don’t have a date on saturday night, if you can think of a way to fix that by writing software, you’re onto something, because a lot of other people have the same problem.

trac

Tue, 16 May 2006 13:00:41 +0000

We’re going to use trac in conjunction with subversion to manage the code for our PowerSchool deployment project. The ticket system in trac looks decent. I’m not so sure about “milestones” — my one attempt to edit a milestone ran into trouble when I entered the date value wrong and fixing that value required entering all the milestone’s fields from scratch. I either screwed up, or the interaction design of that part of trac is poor.

Selenium

Sat, 06 May 2006 01:04:08 +0000

The Selenium software for testing web apps looks promising. We’ve got a boatload of pages to get going in our PowerSchool deployment project and I’m hoping to use something like Selenium to automate some of the testing.

I experimented creating a test using the Selenium IDE plug-in with Firefox and ran into a glitch right away. The page I’m testing does a redirect to force the connection into SSL/https. The IDE tool captures the session OK but when I try to run the test from Selenium on the host it hangs at the point where the conversation switches to the SSL port. I tried starting out in SSL but then it hangs when the ultimate page redirects back to a port 80 connection. Rats.

WordPress blog

Sat, 06 May 2006 00:11:48 +0000

Seems like time to give blogging another shot. (How did I ever get to be such a late adopter).