02.12.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:04 pm by fred
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.
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02.02.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:12 am by fred
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
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09.14.08
Posted in personal at 9:48 am by fred
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
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09.12.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:37 pm by fred
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.
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07.27.08
Posted in technical at 9:04 pm by fred
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.
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07.10.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:24 pm by fred
“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
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06.02.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:05 pm by fred
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.”
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04.23.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:01 pm by fred
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
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01.31.08
Posted in philosophy at 8:30 am by fred
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.
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01.19.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:55 pm by fred
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?
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