My brother the graduate!

Goofball

My brother the goof

The Logic of Time and Procrastination

Here's an attempt at a logically valid argument:

1. If I procrastinate, then I delay until tomorrow what I should do today.
2. If time is a loop, then I could reach "tomorrow" by travelling forward and backward in time.
3. If I can reach "tomorrow" by travelling backward in time, then anything I
do tomorrow I already did in the past.
4. If I already did something then I did not delay.
5. If I did not delay, then I am not a procractinator.
6. If I am a procrastinator and time is a loop, then I am not a procractinator.

Here's what I assigned for each proposition:

P = I procrastinate
D = I delay until tomorrow what I should do today
L = Time is a loop
A = Anything I do tomorrow I already did
B = I can reach tomorrow by travelling backward in time
F = I can reach tomorrow by travelling forward in time

Here's the argument in (mostly) symbolic logic:

1. If P then D
2. If L then (F & B)
3. If B then A
4. If A then ~D
5. If ~D then ~P
6. If (P & L) then ~P

I'll work up the proof to this later.....

and it exPloded...

soooo, I was working on some homework for my programming class Structures and Algorithms and my first assignment was to do some research and write-ups on various algorithms, such as Heapsort, Dijkstra's Algorithm and the Floyd-Warshall Algorithm. Of course I started my research using my favorite online tool, Wikipedia. It didn't take long before I was happily clicking the little blue links on each page to try to learn more in-depth information about each of the algorithms and on what structures they were based and ignoring the throbbing at the back of my head. I was sure the buzzing in my ears was just the noise of the washing machine filtering through the closed door. Unfortunately I was wrong. As I was browsing through some links, I think it was on the Floyd-Warshall Algorithm page, I followed a link to learn more about the directed graph when suddenly it happened, my brain exploded and painted the room with red and gray.... It's a shame I need to clean it up, it left an interesting stucco effect ;)

If you don't hear from me for a while it may be because I'm still trying to cram all the bits back into place....

Taste the rainbow

Into the soup!

Driving down I-90 towards Issaquah on my way to work today I came across this lazy cloud just sitting across my path. Maybe it was trying to hook up with that cute mist off Lake Sammamish, or it could have been just taking in the sites, but it made for an interesting adventure as the drive turned from sunlit excursion to dim, murky crawl for the next quarter mile.

It was almost as if I had taken a detour into the Twilight Zone, and I was waiting for the ghosts of departed Civil War soldiers to approach the car at any moment. Or maybe it was like the many smokey ruins that several of the Enterprise crews had encountered in their many collective travels. Thankfully I wasn't wearing red today...

Wikipedia, the antagonist of the "Know-It-All"

I love Wikipedia for its seeming endless supply of well written articles about anything from the meaning of 'Big-O' notation to the descrition of TV shows like Heroes. My only problem with it is the depth of the knowledge it holds. To demonstrate what I mean, let me take you through a normal WP session...

Hmm, let's look up Prime numbers. I start to read the description, but in the first couple of words I see links to Natural Numbers and Divisors, all of which I should, by inference, understand to better understand my original target, Prime Numbers. So I start with Natural Numbers, in the first sentence alone I come across 4 more linked references, Mathematics, Positive, Non-Negative and Integers. On and on it goes in an endless spiral of information, each linked reference leading you to more, often in a geometric progression using a common ration greater than one!

What can I, a one-time 'Know-It-All' do in the face of such depth of content? I have two options, actually: continue to click, click, click, hoping I will eventually get to that article that simply says "You've reached the END of Wikipedia, please put an icepack on your head, take two pain-relievers and check back in a few days for more links" or I curl up in a ball and whimper quietly to myself in the corner.

Sometimes I choose the former, some days the latter...

Coffee Talk

My friend Dave; late-night coffee & chat session.

Multimedia message

You've been down that road before.

Save me from myself

What makes different people react differently to stress? Why is it some people will get depressed and tune out the world while others get even more involved than they already are? Some people eat when they are upset, some people get outside and run a mile or climb a mountain. How are these people different, and how can a person turn from one to the other?

For most of my life I've been the type that deals with stress by eating and tuning out. What is the root cause of this? Is any of it genetic, or is it all conditioning from when I was a child? Did I learn my coping methods from my mother, who was my main parental role model and therefore my example source of how to behave? She was very much the same, most of the life I can remember with her was spent indoors, sitting in front of the TV.

I need to be different. I need to find a way to re-create my basic response to stress, so that I'd be the one to go out and run that mile instead of vegetating in front of the computer playing a game. Not that playing Everquest or some other computer game is bad, I love gaming and always will, it's just that ALL I do is play computer games, avoiding my responsibility to my personal health. Of course my recent back problems have made it difficult to WANT to go out and run, bike or perform some other type of excercise, but I need to find a way to at least want to try to do something when I'm upset as opposed to nothing.

I also need to teach myself that food is fuel, not entertainment. When I'm stressed I eat, and the more I eat the more depressed I get, which leads to more stress and a vicious cycle. Three years ago when I was unemployed I started a 6 month campaign to lose weight. I did an excellent job, changing my habits to where I was drinking only water and not eating any sweets at all. Of course it was easier not being out every day at a job where the candy machine proves an ever present temptation, but I was out and about several times a week either riding my bike, walking or doing some other form of exercise. I lost almost 50 pounds, but then got depressed when I couldn't quite break through the 300lb mark and slowly converted back to my old habits and gained back about half of that weight. I know I can do it again, but I'm finding it difficult to re-capture that mind-set. How did I ever quit smoking cold-turkey???

No one else is going to do this. I need to save myself from myself. I can only hope that by the time I've learned what I need to do to accomplish it that I'll have some time left to enjoy the results.

Words to code by

An old friend and mentor (thanks Lion) once taught me what I feel is the most important lesson in coding, at least while you're learning how:

Make it
Make it work
Make it work well

Ok, that may not be his exact words, but it's the best my addled brain can remember and it gets the meaning across. On days like today when I'm coding something for a homework assignment, and with every method I create I start dreaming of all the things I can make it do if I tweak this or change that, I need to come back to this mantra.

Of course the people in the OLC tend to stare when I start my chanting, but what good is a mantra if you don't say it out loud??

Temporal Gravity

So in one of my reflective moments today I was thinking about space, geometry and planes. How do you create movement if you're in a space (with little to no gravity) with no friction and nothing to move against? On Earth we can move easily in two dimensions most of the time because we have something to move against (the ground) and gravity is not pushing against us in that direction with a striong force. Try moving "up" and it becomes more difficult, since we are trying to move directly against gravity and we have nothing to move against. Dive into a pool and suddenly you can more easily exert force against gravity and move up through the water.

So what about time? Why is time such a special dimension that we can only move in one direction? Is it that we just don't understand the opposing force that keeps us from moving backward? Like gravity that keeps us on the ground, is there a temporal gravitational force that keeps pushing us from behind as we move along the 4th dimension. How do we go about descibing this force, and how do we defeat it?

Colloquium Presentation Part 1: The Public Sphere: Public Sphere

“By ‘public sphere’ we mean first of all a domain of our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be formed. Access to the public sphere is open in principle to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere is constituted in every conversation in which private persons come together to form a public” (Habermas).

Colloquium Presentation Part 2: The Public Sphere: Public

“Citizens act as a public when they deal with matters of general interest without being subject to coercion; thus with the guarantee that they may assemble and unite freely, and express and publicize their opinions freely” (Habermas).



“When the public is large, this kind of communication requires certain means of dissemination and influence; today, newspapers and periodicals, radio and television are the media of the public sphere” (Habermas).

Colloquium Presentation Part 3: The Public Sphere: Public Opinion

“The term ‘public opinion’ refers to the functions of criticism and control of organized state authority that the public exercises informally, as well as formally during periodic elections” (Habermas).

Blogs can be seen as the newest exercise of public opinion, both formal and informal. Many blogs critique the political process and attempt to assert some measure of control by making sure information is presented in a public forum instead of being swept aside and forgotten.

“Whereas mere opinions (things taken for granted as part of a culture, normative convictions, collective prejudices and judgments) seem to persist unchanged in their quasi-natural structure as a kind of sediment of history, public opinion, in terms of its very idea, can be formed only if a public that engages in rational discussion exists” (Habermas).

Colloquium Presentation Part 4: The Public Sphere: Political Representation in the Era of the Public Sphere

“Representation in the sense of the bourgeois public sphere, as in ‘representing’ the nation or specific clients, has nothing to do with representative publicness, which inheres in the concrete existence of a lord. As long as the prince and the estates of his realm ‘are’ the land, rather then merely ‘representing’ it, they are capable of this kind of representation; they represent their authority ‘before’ the people rather than for the people” (Habermas).

What example can we use to demonstrate the idea of Representative Publicness vs Representation in a Bourgeois Public Sphere?
Example

Colloquium Presentation Part 5: The Public Sphere: Public Sphere Media

“They [the Bourgeois] soon began to make use of the public sphere of informational newspapers, which was officially regulated, against the public power itself, using those papers, along with the morally and critically oriented weeklies, to engage in debate about the general rules governing relations in their own essentially privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and labor” (Habermas)

Colloquium Presentation Part 6: The Public Sphere: Transformation of News Media

“The political daily press came to have an important role during this same period. In the second half of the eighteenth century, serious competition to the older form of news writing as the compiling of items of information arose in the form of literary journalism. Karl Bucher describes the main outlines of this development: ‘From mere institutions for the publication of news, newspapers became the vehicles and guides of public opinion as well, weapons of party politics. The consequence of this for the internal organization of the newspaper enterprise was the insertion of a new function between the gathering of news and its publication: the editorial function” (Habermas)

Art Speigelman's depiction in In the Shadow of No Towers of his "interview" with Tom Brokaw illustrates this idea that the media guides public opinion instead of merely reporting it.

Colloquium Presentation Part 7: The Public Sphere: The Sway of Public Relations

“Whereas at one time publicness was intended to subject persons or things to the public use of reason and to make political decisions susceptible to revision before the tribunal of public opinion, today it has often enough already been enlisted in the aid of the secret policies of interest groups; in the form of ‘publicity’ it now acquires public prestige for persons or things and renders them capable of acclamation in a climate of nonpublic opinion. The term ‘public relations’ itself indicated how a public sphere that formerly emerged from the structure of society must now be produced circumstantially on a case-by-case basis” (Habermas).

Colloquium Presentation Part 8: Blogs as a Medium for the Public Sphere

Blogs are a way for private individuals and organizations to hold conversation in a medium virtually free from the coercion of the public power. PBS has a feature in their Media Matters section entitled Welcome to the Blogosphere which has a link to a video Blogfather Glenn Reynolds that gives a short explanation of what a blog is.