depth first search

I downloaded duo505’s Another Illusion and Hot Chip’s latest One Life Stand. Both are solid albums that I suspect will grow on me, but neither provided quite the cleansing inspiration I was looking for today.

I can’t complain too loudly. My state of mind lately oscillates between total despair and grim resignation. I know from experience that I should not expect to actually enjoy anything during this period. I’ve given up alcohol, started exercising twice a day, and have adopted a nearly fetishistic approach to food consumption. None of these lifestyle changes is really making any kind of dent in my psyche as I dance around the hollow shell of my true problem.

I seem to be out of ideas.

My recent project to get back into shape is ramping up quite a bit. I was looking at old photographs the other day and reminiscing about the heady days of during and just after high school. I don’t have a particularly good memory, though I seem to understand the rough outline of how I felt at the time, and I’ve been struggling with how I can feel nostalgia for a time when I do not remember being particularly happy.

I was in the best shape of my life back then, even if my continually self-doubting nature would not or could not recognize it at the time. Since then I’ve been shedding good habits for bad, often in pursuit of the kind of casual adaptation that various places tend to force upon adults. The real world, it seems, is less about striving than about trying not to forget too quickly. But I’ve been living in Austin as a student for awhile now, and by now I’ve realized that singular interests often result in singular disappointments, and that a diversity of interests is not the zero sum game I thought it was.

In other random news:

• The price of a haircut rose $1 since my last trim.
• The luge governing body issued a statement prevaricating on the nature of causality.
• Uchi is louder than I thought it would be, and the parking situation leaves a lot to be desired.
• I have Google Apps set up for this domain!
• I also have Google Voice: (512) 814-8037.
• I agree with Peter Norvig that data is unreasonably effective — until it isn’t.

I first heard about the church bombings in Malaysia on NPR a few days ago. The story, which is still not at all clear, involves Muslim and Malay opposition to the use of the the Malay word for God in newsletters for Christian churches. As I understand it, this particular term has been in common use among Christians for many years in that country. The transition from status quo of peace to a status quo of violence is so surreal that  I suspect some kind of tail wagging the dog style actions on the part of the government (speculation that NPR took pains to keep out of the story, but Al Jazeera doesn’t hesitate to air in the linked clip).

Even worse, maybe we have some kind of clandestine effort to destabilize the region or the balance of tensions between Christians and Muslims in predominantly Muslim countries. This seems like a strange story any way you slice it.

The next is this highly understated announcement by Google that cleverly accuses China of state sponsored cyberspace attacks on American corporations. Google’s response is to stop censoring their search engine and possibly shut down Google’s Chinese operations. This strikes me as the wrong response. For one, I’m not sure Google has the kind of dominance in China that it has in the United States, so as a practical matter, leaving the market may only generate  something of a “so what?” amongst the Chinese user base. If Google really wants to engage the Chinese on the issue of human rights, why give up such a valuable foothold for conducting counter espionage against the Chinese authority? Seems like Google is throwing away a valuable set of tools in exchange for some kind of glitzy PR.

As you can probably tell, I haven’t been doing much more than micro-blogging. Two weeks in Thailand followed by all the catchup here at school has stood between me and putting together new posts. Besides some Google-China conspiracy theories, I don’t really have much lined up in the future. I’m hoping to continue to blog about my research, but that seems to be dominated by my efforts to replicate certain existing algorithms on the way to generating my own. It’s a slow process that I’ll write about when I’m finished, but not anything I’m prepared to comment on now.

On the technical front, I’m now an iPod Touch owner, I recently upgraded my work computer to 64-bit Ubuntu, and I bought a new router. The iPod touch has been heavily reviewed elsewhere, the 64-bit Ubuntu upgrade was surprisingly uneventful, and the router just works (probably because it was not made by D-Link).

So that leaves Thailand pictures, which I’ll go ahead and outsource to someone who has both a better camera and a better eye than I do. Check it out.

Oh boy. After a couple of wasted hours of futzing I was finally able to fix the column width issue. All was not lost, as a basic understanding of CSS/HTML is a good thing to have in the toolkit these days. A few debugging tips:

1. Use the Firebug Firefox extension.
2. Look for the largest containing box with the issue.
3. Modify IDs not Classes.
4. Sometimes the obvious keyword is not the right keyword (e.g. max-width versus width).
5. Change one thing at a time.
6. Be sure to remember how to reverse any change.
7. Ditch old IE workarounds on principle.

I keep hearing about this problem of communicating with people in the future about dangerous radioactive waste storage sites. My solution to the problem is to make the sites as desolate and unremarkable as possible. Given our natural curiosity, putting up elaborate structures seems like more like an invitation than a prohibition, even if those structures are designed to be foreboding or menacing.

And if people of the future happen upon this desolate and unremarkable wasteland, what then? Well, some of them get sick and die. We have  to trust that humanity’s ability to formulate causal models from that kind of data remains intact, and so the rest will relearn the forgotten lessons of the past. In other words, the best way to communicate with the future by doing nothing special and trusting that they will figure it out.

UPDATE: Ana called me out for not reading the linked article (just the pull quote). This is one of those cases where a piece of news is making multiple circuits around the web, and I had assumed (wrongly) that the links led to an article I had read awhile ago, and not the current (and quite interesting) interview.

I also have to revise my own plan somewhat. A Rosetta stone like monument is clearly the best bet for the short term, assuming some language survives. Though computational linguistics is making progress decoding languages with no Rosetta stone analogue, the ability for future generations to interpret signs increases dramatically if one of the available languages is known.

The case where no language survives in its current form is more complex. Here’s were my plan makes a bit more sense. You have to weigh the probability of discovery against the probable protocols future humans (or others) might employ should the site be discovered. I was imagining an ideal scenario where the site could avoid detection for a million years.

But what if it is discovered? I think the best result is to have some kind of subtle but lasting monument, and let the experience of exploring a radioactive hot zone (and the inevitable bad result) lead future explorers to the correct conclusion about the meaning of the monument. Basically, if people find the repository, we want to make sure they explore it, and by exploring it, learn the nature of the danger. This avoids the terrible case where people settle the area without any knowledge of the danger lurking underneath.

Last year Anastasia and I went as undecided Ohio voters. This year we’ve chosen a more subtle muse:

I now own a pair of overalls. And a pitchfork.

Sifting through my Akismet spam filter today I noticed a number of comments in Cyrillic. Clicking the associated website links led me to Russian language default themed Wordpress blogs. It seems like splogs are easy to identify, even when written in another language.

[Aside: Even though I'm 99% sure these are spam blogs, and so won't link to them, I'm basing this solely on the way the blogs appear, and not on any kind of semantic understanding of the content. Interestingly, this is actually quite close to the way most spam filters "view" spam, as a collection of semantically meaningless but connected word bags.]

Paul Krugman thinks this is about healthcare. I think it’s about how Princeton’s endowment is like, totally fubar.

Second, I’m sort of surprised that a Nobel prize winning faculty member is subjected to this kind of bureaucratic letter campaign. I sort of thought the no-questions-asked benefits would have come along with the free prime parking. Maybe Princeton has too many prize faculty, and can no longer afford to pay them all.