diiq

Whelp, I’ve put it off until it can be put off no more. So, to my dearest internet friends who have...

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:25:15 -0600

Whelp, I’ve put it off until it can be put off no more. So, to my dearest internet friends who have not yet heard, here’s what’s happening, the short version:

This afternoon, I’m getting on a plane, flying to LA, Fiji, Auckland, and finally arriving in Christchurch, New Zealand, two days from now, having skipped over the 1st of February entirely.

There is a bike waiting for me near the airport. I’ll bus and bike south, to Clinton. In Clinton I’m working on an Organic Farm, in exchange for room and board.

After a few weeks, I’ll move on to another work-for-shelter exchange.

The goal is to return, in one year, having lost only the money spent on plane tickets.

FAQ:

Why New Zealand? Because they offer a working holiday visa to US citizens. The other options were South Korea and Ireland.

How do you find people willing to host you? Help Exchange.

Are you taking your computer? Nope! I’m taking a keyboard kindle, which has free 3G. If you need to tell me something, email it. My intention, though, is to avoid the internet for a few months, and do a little thinking for myself.

What about pictures? And blog posts? I’m taking my sketchbook, and a teeny watercolor set. You’ll get to hear, and see, all about it when I get back.

What will you do when you get back? I have no idea.

Why are you doing such a silly irresponsible thing?

“One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.” Herman Hesse

“The usual person is more than content, he is even proud, to remain within the indicated bounds, and popular belief gives him every reason to fear so much as the first step into the unexplored. The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.” Joseph Campbell

“You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.” Rene Daumal

“In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kind of people” Mark Twain

Or maybe I’m just running away.

Love you all, and see you in a few months. -S

I am, once again, struck by the fact that I’m living in the future. Here’s how I prototyped a...

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:08:39 -0600

I am, once again, struck by the fact that I’m living in the future. Here’s how I prototyped a product in 14 days, while away visiting my family.

I. Find a problem.

On the 15th, I stepped on my Kindle, and cracked the screen. It’s the second time I’ve had a kindle with a broken screen.

II. Try…

I have a friend who asked for some thoughts about his drawings. It was gonna be pretty public...

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:41:00 -0600

I have a friend who asked for some thoughts about his drawings. It was gonna be pretty public anyway, so once I realized that I needed half a dozen pictures to make my point, I asked if I could put my reply here.

I am qualified to say things about drawing because I am mediocre. Being mediocre is the best qualification, because it means I’ve had to really work to learn to make a nice drawing. Naturally talented people make poor teachers, because they haven’t made all the mistakes. I’ve made plenty of them, and I’ll make plenty more, but I am slowly mapping the minefield. Read More

From the sketchbook, an ecorche horse. Cribbed off a painting by...

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:00:17 -0600

From the sketchbook, an ecorche horse. Cribbed off a painting by Steve Grant, all credit to him.

From the sketchbook, a burgonet by Filippo Negroli. The original...

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:59:55 -0600

From the sketchbook, a burgonet by Filippo Negroli. The original here.

Trying to re-learn how to draw, this time with pen & ink....

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:21:52 -0600

Trying to re-learn how to draw, this time with pen & ink. This figure-drawing session tool is GOD.

The Church of Interruption

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:52:00 -0600

Sometimes I am startled to realize, in the middle of a discussion, that I have offended or hurt some of the people I’m talking with.

First, know and accept this: I have a friend who is a wizard. He is an ancient and wise wizard, and we have tea together. One teatime, I mentioned my talking troubles to my friend, and he said this:

“Yes, Sam, I’ll bet it is hard for you — holding controversial religious beliefs, I mean.” *

Now, I am not a religious person; and my friend is aware of that. Not knowing where he was headed, I nodded for him to continue.

That Guy Syndrome

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:06:51 -0600

Hi, doc. How are you?

:::

Well, okay, I guess.

:::

Yes, it’s a professional call, but I don’t really need a diagnosis. I already know what I’ve got. It’s That Guy Syndrome, doc. I’ve got TGS, and I’m scared.

Shakespeare Authorship Haiku Challenge

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 11:24:02 -0500

Shakespeare Authorship Haiku Challenge:

My entry:

    Ah -- speak, seer!
Name him, whose pen pulled
bluebottles from blank pages --
spontaneous life!

But don’t worry, you should enter even if you’re not the ULTIMATE UNIVERSAL POETRY GENIUS, like me.

Hi, diiq - thanks for replying to my question about the golden ratio. I still don't understand, however -- how do harmonics exist in a way that the ratio doesn't? Isn't the mathematical relationship of the ratio (1+sqrt(5)/2) just as physical and measurable as uniform frequencies? Whether or not either is "pleasant" to perceive is entirely subjective, all the same - is it not?

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 20:03:48 -0500

You already know most of this, I sure. I’ll say it anyway, because saying it will help me figure out more clearly why I disagree with you. While I am confident I disagree, expressing why is verbally frustrating —- which means it’s totally worth exploring. So:

Imagine the inside of a piano: all the strings tucked in next to each other.

When you whack the middle C string, all the other strings will vibrate, sympathetically, more or less. Those that vibrate most will be the other ‘c’ strings —- the ones that naturally vibrate twice (or half) as fast. Then, there are the strings that vibrate simple fractions faster: 3/2, say. This is all just a simple, boring, physical process, right? Air is hit by one string, and hits another string. Hit that second string at the right times, it moves more. Hit it at random times, it’ll barely budge. If you made a string that vibrated 131/127ths of the speed of that C string, it would not vibrate very much at all.

Our ears (and minds) find harmonies pleasing because our ears use exactly this process to perceive sound: the sympathetic vibrations of many oscillators with different fundamental frequencies. Hearing a C vibrates C-ish inner-ear-hairs lots, A-ish hairs some, and B-sharp-sharp-ish hairs almost none at all.

But sympathetic vibration happens even if there are no ears nearby to hear, or minds to percieve.

Thats what I mean when I say that harmonics are a physical process that we happen to describe mathematically using simple ratios.

The golden ratio is neat, and it pops up a lot —- but there’s no physical process that makes it pleasing. Our eyes don’t use continuing fractions in order to see, and rectangles of varying proportions are all just rectangular if there are no eyes to see or minds to percieve.

(As an aside, the precise, physical reality of harmonics shows up in our perception of them. It did so even before we knew what harmonics were. It’s easy to hear a single hz error off of a perfect harmony, on notes that are measured in hundreds of hz.

It’s nearly impossible to notice that a proportion is only .25% away from the golden ratio.)

So the golden ratio might be the most beautiful. There might be some part of out mind that prefers 1:1.61 more than any other visual relationship. But that would be particular to the human eye and mind —- and it would have to be demonstrated that it is so. That ratio is not inherently visually more special than, say, 1:2, or 1:1, or 16:9, each of which have their one intruiging and mathemystical properties.

On Hyper Volumes

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 09:04:50 -0500

Kartik Agaram was kind enough to point me to this fascinating article on the volume of hyperspheres: http://bit-player.org/2011/the-n-ball-game

I’m going to use this as an example of why I dislike using equations in introducing an idea. Looking at that graph, and accepting that equation, I get the immediate sens of shrinking spheres. As you increase the number of dimensions, the spheres get smaller, right?

Then I have a tiny doubt. That graph, it’s comparing n-dimensional volume to n+1 dimensional volume. I’m not sure what it means to ask about the relationship between a number of unit cubes and a number of unit squares. The article kindly mentions that he’s doing this, but I still don’t know what it means.

So instead of accepting the equation, I’m going to reject it, and try and picture what’s happening. Imagine, first, a unit square inside a unit circle.

Photo

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:40:43 -0500

Leaking II

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:34:00 -0500

Kartik Agaram pointed out that I haven’t mentioned what happens during the assignment of pre-declared variables in scope.

Here are a few scenarios. This first example signals an error, because a has no binding when print a is called:

def foo (b):
   a ← b

foo 15
print a

This example prints 15:

a ← 5
def foo (b):
   a ← b

foo 15
print a

Which seems acceptable —- but this also prints 15:

On Murakami

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:34:00 -0500

I’m reading the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, getting myself ready for 1Q84. Haruki Murakami writes books that, I will always hold, are the greatest works of contemporary fiction. I love them, but they frustrate me.

They are lyrical, dreamlike, mythic, and familiar.

What’s frustrating is that I can’t understand them technically. I’m happy to dissect modern or classic lit; Joyce or Hardy, Shakespeare or O’Nolan. I know my way around stories and the way they’re told, and words and the way they’re used.

Photo

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:33:53 -0500

Photo

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:33:23 -0500

Photo

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:33:00 -0500

Leaking I

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:33:00 -0500

I’m designing a programming language called Tainted Oyster.

One thing I have to think about is how to set a variable in the current scope. The easy way is the straightforward way:

a ← 25

This pairs the value 25 with the symbol a, in the scope in which it’s written. (The cheap way to say that is, “Now a is 25.” Unfortunately, I’m kinda slow, and when I’m directly discussing the value bound to the same symbol in different scopes, little lies like “is” often trap me.)

But I want to be able to abstract-ify assignment; for instance, in writing the procedure def. def creates a function and assigns it to a symbol in the current scope:

def fib (val):
    if (val <= 0):
        1
        val + fib (val - 1)

For the moment, though, let me stick to a simpler example. Here’s the skeleton of a function that tries to set a to 5 times a number:

How I Described my Programming Job to Biochemists

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:33:00 -0500

or How I Described my Biochemistry Job to Programmers

Hi. I write computer programs for the lab. Some of what I write gets run here, on our machines. Some of it is run on a supercomputer — really, a whole lot of computers like the ones in our lab, all working together. Because some of you are more experienced with chemistry and others more with programming, bear with me as I touch on the basics of each.

Broadly, my focus for the past year and a half has been this problem: if we know the sequence of a bit of RNA, how do we guess the shape it makes? When I am programming, an RNA sequence is a specific, linear pattern of letters — people who write programs call that a string. Rather than say “the A that’s 25 bases from the 3’ end,” I number them, starting with 0, from the 5’ end (that’s the left).

A secondary structure is a set of pairs of letters — that’s a set, the mathematical entity; I usually imagine it as a bag that can hold as much as I like, but only unique things (you can’t pack two pairs of socks). It’s a set of pairs — like, the A at 25, and the U at 12. It’s common to write a set with curly braces, like this: ‘{}’ and a pair with parens, like this: ‘(12, 25)’.

There are, as you all know, some extra restrictions on what pairs are allowed. I can’t put an ‘(A, A)’ in my bag. AU GC GU; that’s it. I also can’t have pairs that are too close together: ‘(44, 46)’. Those are restrictions that nature has given us — some of those restrictions we do see — but it’s so rare that we disallow them to make the problem simpler.

There are other restrictions on my secondary-structure bag that are purely for simplicity. I can’t put these two pairs in the same bag: {(12, 25), (19, 44)}. I can’t use them both because they make a pseudoknot — one half of each pair is between the opposing pair, and the other half is outside. When both sides of on pair are between the halves of another pair, we call that nesting, and it fits in my bag; it’s OK if they’re both outside, too — that’s allowed in the bag. Pseudoknots do happen in nature, but they’re barred from my bag, because they make my task very very difficult.

So, out of curiosity, make a guess as to how many different ways there are to fill my bag — that is, how many different secondary structures — there are on average, if the sequence is 14 bases long?

diiqart: Vetinari is not detaining you.

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:32:44 -0500

diiqart:

Vetinari is not detaining you.