encoded notions

I wonder what it’s like to have an immune system that doesn’t act like it just returned from a semi-annual retard convention. An immune system that didn’t think that pollen was some foreign deadly assassin.

Now I’m all cool with the evolutionary advantage that this would give me, say, if some horrible human-geared virus or bacteria piggybacked onto the reproductive systems of plants. In that case I would be the one laughing and sneezing as everyone else was vomiting blood and searching desperately for a cure.

The part about seasonal allergies that I’m not cool with is when a stuffy nose provides the perfect staging ground for some other type of invader. That is most definitely un-awesome.

Stop and think for a minute. Not just a wistful look back at the recent past, but a good hard look at the past few years. You’ve probably spent a considerable amount of your free time in those years on the web. Right now, I bet that you are reading this in a feed-reader of some sort, or were pointed to the newness of this blog post by a program or web application that tracked this site’s feed.

When I try to peer backwards in time through the mire of my mid-2003 introduction to feeds, I see murkiness; I can’t quite remember how I managed to find anything on the internet before feeds. Google? Searching? Random clicking?

Peering through a paradigm shift is hard.

Today I try to use web searches to probe for information and answers that are globbed under the category of “not new”. Anything that bears the slightest hint of a newness attribute sends me straight to Technorati. The rest of my web experience is “delivered” to me in my aggregator of choice.

I can now choose to be passive in my web-exploits and not feel ‘disconnected’.

From the sheer number of sites offering web feeds of one flavor or another, it is a fairly safe assumption that this notion of passive delivery is a catchy idea.

If I strap my thinking-cap down tightly, I can eke out a several memories of my pre-2003 web experience:

• I can remember browsing with IE4 on a dial-up connection—patiently waiting (ha! patience…on the web) for the images of a website to load into the <TABLE>s that were so popular.
• I can remember using Lycos and Metacrawler to search for answers to the kinds of questions that could not be answered by my local or school libraries—and not being thrilled with the craptastic results.
• I can remember keeping track of hundreds of bookmarks in my browser so that I could return to the wonderful fonts of information that I would manage to find by sheer luck.
• I can remember attempting to figure out this HTML and CSS ‘thing’ so I could experiment with making a website on Geocities.
• I can remember downloading free compilers for C programming.
• I can remember downloading the floppy-based installer for Slackware Linux and marveling at the sheer coolness of ‘changing the engine’ of my computer.
• I can remember stumbling across the entire network of Myst & Riven related websites, and eventually becoming a lurker on the fan-run mailing lists.
• I can remember when reading a website felt like sneaking into someone’s home while they were away at work.
• I can remember when the web could be organized into a clean little tree.
• I can remember when ICQ was cool and everyone in high school had a unique user ID number.
• I can remember before I had web access at home and could only access it from infrequent trips to my local library, and through various web-to-email services that I could use via my totally awesome free Juno email account.
• I can remember setting up Callwave so that I could keep the phone lines tied up with internet traffic and not have my parents get mad at me for ruining potential sales for their at-home business.
• I can remember how creepy it felt typing in my parents’ credit card number for the first time into a “128-bit secure” website.
• I can remember way before my introduction to the internet, when I used my local area BBSes to find shareware and neat things like The Anarchist Cookbook (the section describing the thermal sensitivity required to make nitroglycerin is a real hoot to a high-schooler when you read that a particularly sensitive step is exothermic and if you leave a certain thermal range you are instructed to “run…away”).
• I can remember trying to explain the web to my parents.
• I can remember stumbling (by random chance) across this “cool new search engine” that had truly excellent results.
• I can remember printing out webpages so that I could actually learn things in school when teachers were teaching to the rest of the class.

Finally, I can remember when I thought of the web as a thing, and not as a place. What I don’t remember is how I ever got anything out of the web at all. I don’t remember my process or my procedure for trailblazing. I can’t see that clearly through the fog of time.

It’s hard to point out when and where it started, but it sure does feel like something—a concept or an approach—infected the web and fundamentally altered its genetic makeup, but what? I don’t think “socialness” is the necessarily the right answer, though many people seem to think that it is. People have always been on the web—building it and shaping it.

I think that the culprit may have been a sort of mind-virus that had an origin and spread and amplified through the fertile interconnectedness provided by the fresh landscape of the web. It must have been an idea that made people shift their perceptions ever-so-slightly. Add that to the recursive, networked-structure of the web and all it takes is a tiny perturbation to send the whole system off in a completely new direction—taking us silently along for the ride.

I was reading an article on atheism and I came up with a great referential analogy to Lost. [Note: I’ll try to not disclose details that would be of a significantly spoilerish nature for Lost.]

“Atheism” is a word used by religious people to refer to those who do not share their belief in the existence of supernatural entities or agencies. Presumably (as I can never tire of pointing out) believers in fairies would call those who do not share their views “a-fairyists”, hence trying to keep the debate on fairy turf, as if it had some sensible content; as if there were something whose existence could be a subject of discussion worth the time.

People who do not believe in supernatural entities do not have a “faith” in “the non-existence of X” (where X is “fairies” or “goblins” or “gods”); what they have is a reliance on reason and observation, and a concomitant preparedness to accept the judgment of both on the principles and theories that premise their actions.

We observe events (typically) on the Lost island from the perspective of the characters who were involved in the plane crash. As the episodes progress, it becomes apparent that they are not the only people on the island. They grow to adopt the term “the Others” to label the mysterious group of island inhabitants disjoint from their own.

Much later, a captured man is suspected of being one of the Others. Here is some dialogue that is exchanged:

Sayid (from the plane): “She believes he’s an Other.” Captured man: “An other what?”

The term Other is an exclusionary term, much like the term atheist. If two Others were to meet I doubt that they would call each other Others; they would probably have a more useful label for themselves (e.g. Curators), since they share a common set of organizing thoughts, ideals, and goals. Similarly, the term atheist only means something when used in the context of a faith. Between two atheists it would be silly to call each other atheists since atheism is not an inclusive term by design. Terms such as Christian, Muslim, and Hindu are inclusive as they define a shared set of precepts and beliefs among the self-identified members. As far as I know, there is no inclusive counterpart to atheist.

Unfortunately, I think that any use of an inclusive term to describe atheists would be counter to the point of atheism. You can’t simply codify the necessary framework of logic and reason into an easy-to-swallow pill; you have to come to it like a series of reasoned conclusions, like calculus. If you presented the table of derivatives and integrals to someone who just finished learning their multiplication tables, the best they could do would be to just assume the table was true and use it mindlessly. A better route to take would be to sit them down and explain how you start at multiplication and work through algebra and eventually arrive at calculus. Then they wouldn’t have to believe the derivatives and integrals listed on your table, because at that point they would know that they must be true within the context of the other rules and derivations that preceded them.

Ascribing an inclusive group label to something like atheism is like handing the table of derivatives and integrals to a child. If you make it too easy to self-identify with atheism, by “jumping on the bandwagon” and outright assuming all of its arguments, then you end up with a group of people who believe in atheism.

And that, is the road to religion.

I’m going to try and record this feeling before it flees. It is written in the context of taking an exam, but this is how I experience other fixed-interval “performances”, too.

My procrastinatory impetus is derived from a process that would make Ivan Pavlov feel like breaking out the dog biscuits. Some time ago some endorphin conduits got crossed in the deep recesses of boiler room in my head. During an exam, I feel short-term stress that I will not be able to force myself, in the time allotted, into the flow-state that I typically require for usual problem-solving tasks. My shoulders and the back of my neck become tensed and I usually start to get a mid-level headache. This feeling will oscillate throughout the exam as I coax answers and insight out of a part of me that does not like to operate in such a harsh environment. Towards the end of the time interval, what remains is typically one or two questions that I start to have trouble with. These manifest as items that I know that I know, but just can’t find in my internal card catalog. The tension mounts as I engage in a frantic search of the halls of my brain like a little kid who has lost his mother in a shopping mall.

Desperation sets in and I start scribbling down anything that comes to mind that may or may not be quite correct in hopes that the physical act of writing will tease the proper answers out of my subconscious. Sometimes this works and sometimes it does not. Regardless, it is not like I can’t complete the problem; in most cases I am more than confident that I could finish quite well if given more time to ease into the problem-solving flow state. Alas, this is hardly the case.

Time is called. Pencils down.

I walk up and hand in the exam, gather my things, and step out of the door. Almost immediately the tension bleeds from my neck and this is when the feeling sets in. It would be an exaggeration to call it serenity or pleasure, but it bears some resemblance to each. It’s definitely not the byproduct of giving into the inevitable: that the exam is now in the past and there’s nothing to be done about it anymore. My mind feels somewhat detached from the body as I can just embrace the strange feeling and let my body continue to do the walking to wherever I must go.

The feeling is one of release—of being able to wrap up a moment of time in aneat little box and filing it away in a giant warehouse like at the end of Raiders.

I find myself stopping to ask the question: how does my interpretation of the world differ from the norm? I read about and watch characters in books and movies who sometimes seem challenged by the task of learning. In their attempts to learn, they will often give up after some effort and accept a limited understanding. Usually this abortive pursuit is not the result of growing tired or bored of the topic, but because they appear physically incapable of comprehending past a certain point.

These are the people who run out and buy Cliff’s Notes, devise crazy mnemonics, go to every study session, and take obsessively elaborate handwritten notes in class only to spend the week before an exam completely worried over failing. Failing?!? Failing usually requires that you not know anything about the topic being tested. How could someone who spent as much time and effort as my stereotypical student above, and come even close to failing? I do not understand is how someone can be that immersed in something and at the same time be so utterly clueless.

Is my brain that different from the average? I usually take notes that will never be read again, only read over the material cursorily once, do just the required work, and almost never worry too much over exams—-even graduate exams. The only field where I have encountered any need for something vaguely resembling this crazy habit is a field such as history where there is no clear unifying organizational structure. In the rest of the cases, this “desperate” struggle to learn is baffling to me. Is this similar to the ignorance displayed about “blurriness” or “redness” by a man born blind?

While I am learning something that’s remotely interesting, new concepts generally tend to “snap into place” without much effort. Afterward, there’s still a need to solidify this information with a few exercises to acquire a bit of working knowledge, but that is usually where I stop.

I’ve heard arguments that this kind of learning leads to poor knowledge retention over long durations, but I can attest that this is not the case—at least for me.

From what I’ve read in the past and more recently, people behaving like me tend to breeze right through high school with little to no effort, and then crash hard in college. The former may be true for me, but definitely not the latter; in many ways college was actually far easier than high school which really throws most arguments I read for a loop.

So I ask once again, how far away from the norm am I?

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

I moved to RichardBoyer.net last night. I’ve had the domain for awhile, but just hadn’t gotten around to caring enough to use it. Part of the ickiness involved some crazy editing of my very, very ugly looking .htaccess file full of redirects. I’ve moved so much stuff around over the years that moving a domain requires editing the .htaccess file for two separate sites to avoid the multi-hop rewrite where the browser gets hippity-hopped from one subdomain to another before getting sent along to the final destination.

After that was settled, I wanted to once-and-for-all fix this annoying problem with the greedy Wordpress mod_rewrite configuration consuming ALL 403 and 404 HTTP errors from anything under the WP folder. This might be fine and dandy for someone who only uses Wordpress, but I was hoping to maybe try installing Trac at http://RichardBoyer.net/trac/ at some point in the future. Having Trac errors get bounced over to Wordpress to render seems absolutely silly.

I swear it took me upwards of 3-4 hours of trial and error this time to settle on a reasonable solution that seems to work.

Penultimate Solution

In the .htaccess file for the subfolder in question under the WP root:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
ErrorDocument 403 /404.html

Then just make the file $WP_ROOT/404.html be some simple 404 message, and problem solved. I think apache looks in the subfolder for a .htaccess file and if it fails, instead of jumping up to the parent $WP_ROOT directory, it sees information on ErrorDocument handling in the local .htaccess file and never flows into WP. As a side-affect, however, this creates the problem of having to create a .htaccess file in each and every subfolder that you wish to ‘hide’ from Wordpress.

This is clearly an unacceptable solution.

Ultimate Solution

In the .htaccess file for the WP root, somewhere above the special rules written by Wordpress during permalink-generation, add these lines:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
ErrorDocument 403 /404.html

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^folderNameToHide/.*$  -  [L]
</IfModule>

Then you won’t need the additional subfolder .htaccess file. I interpret this solution as saying: always try to load things from folderNameToHide, even if they don’t exist. If they don’t exist, instead of evaluating more RewriteRules in this file, we stop here and just use the ErrorDocument handlers that we know about. Don’t bother waking up Wordpress to complain.

From some preliminary tests, this is the only solution that made it so that nonexistent files and files that had incorrect permissions used the 404.html file, and all Wordpress-related absent posts used the built-in Wordpress 404-scheme.

Human memory is a lot like a library filled with thousands of books. Each book is sealed in an anonymous dust jacket and labeled with some numerical identifier and shelved according to some wacky algorithm. Within each book is a description of some discrete concept and a pages of tags and references pointing to other books. At the front desk in this library is a card catalog containing a mapping of symbol names to book identifiers. The references in the backs of those books are symbol names which is important to recognize. For completeness, I should also point out that there is a small shelf near the front door housing a few uncatalogued books and a short list of their respective symbol names.

In my little analogy, the shelves and shelves of books are long-term memory, the small shelf by the front door is short-term memory, and the card catalog represents “knowing” something. I’ll explain this last bit using the model that I’ve just described:

When we are first introduced to some new topic we bring that topic into our “new releases” section at the front of the library and write it down on a list; this is so we can quickly look up this information without having to dig around in the card catalogs and wheeling around those funny looking library-ladders you see so often in movies set in fancy colleges and British schools. Very often we will be introduced to something that just isn’t worth putting into the library forever, so we just discard the book from the short-term shelf and never bother putting it into the card catalog. Less often we will want to remember something because it is useful to do so, and we will go through the motions of:

1. putting on a nice dust jacket
2. filling out a symbol-to-identifier lookup card
3. figuring out what other books it seems to reference in our library, and scratching those down in the very back of the book as notes to ourselves
4. finding a place for it in the stacks

Now say that while you were busy stuffing new cards into your exquisite card catalog that some of the symbol-name cards began to stick to other cards, the writing on older cards faded, and some cards fell out of place and out of the little drawers holding the cards. Just because you can’t find the card doesn’t mean the book isn’t out there, playing hide-and-seek in the stacks. The knowledge about that topic is still in your brain but you just can’t figure out how to get at it. The system that I’ve outlined above seems to be rather error-prone, so I shall now extend it to offer some redundancy and backup.

Over time, you’ll find yourself looking up certain books in series. For example say you wanted to look up the book on dogs. You’d swing by the card catalog and take out the card for dogs, examine the identification number and weave your way through the stacks to find the dog-book. After refreshing yourself on dogs you turn to the back of the dog-book and peruse the list of references. Due to the frequent mention of ‘cats’ in the dog-book, you decide to look up the reference for ‘cats’. You put the dog-book back and have to go all the way back to the catalog, replace the dog-card, find the cat-card, and navigate to the cat-book. If I were doing this every day, I’d get really annoyed and probably whip out a pen and start copying down the list of dog-references and their identification numbers onto the dog-card. Then the mapping of symbols-names to book-identifiers would be somewhat redundantly preserved with associated books. In my analogy I could go straight from the dog-book to the cat-book without hopping back to the catalog since I’m still carrying around the dog-card with all of that additional metadata on it.

Now that I’ve extended my analogy, I can explain what happens when we forget. Say that I was reading a new book about blindness and it mentions ‘seeing eye dogs’. I want to look up information about dogs, so I go on over to the catalog and lookup the symbol ‘dog’. Unfortunately the dog-card has gone missing, so I am left with this weird feeling of knowing that I know something, but can’t get at it. I think we’ve all experienced this when watching quiz-shows on TV or taking a cumulative final exam. It’s a frustrating feeling, but the very way that memory works we can usually find circuitous routes back to the requested information. In my analogy we could randomly start going through the catalog looking for really general symbols (like ‘object’, ‘person’, ‘life’, etc.) looking for something that references ‘dog’. If we dig around long enough we’ll stumble across the pet-card or even the cat-card, each of which contains some sort of copied identifier information from the dog-card if the association between pet/dog (or cat/dog) was strong enough to warrant the copy. By following loose-links we can recover the information that we temporarily lost access to, and potentially even recreate the missing dog-card from the related cards.

The Point

Now that we live in the era of online search engines being quite useful, how many times per day do you find yourself querying the Internet for something that you have temporarily forgotten? The most useful search queries I perform are of the type “I know what I’m looking for because I know that I used to know it.” The task then becomes to quickly scan over the information on the result pages and the temporary forgetfulness is averted. It’s a similar effect to surrounding yourself with lots of thick reference manuals: you are outsourcing your memories by filling your brain with more information and letting some external source provide you with hooks into that memory, rather than digging through your own internal card-catalog hoping to find some references for the forgotten-item.

With the unification and normalization of a hefty chunk of human knowledge, we’ve built a Global Memory that anyone on the Earth with access to a computer and Internet connection can use to extend the utility of their own minds. Rather than wait for evolution to get around to extending our brain-size, we’ve hacked around the problem with engineering.

Note that I am calling it a Global Memory, not a Global Consciousness. Something of that nature requires a few more orders of magnitude of hackery to form, and is quite a bit more scary.

link to video on youtube

Watch this video, and also check out the rest of “Atheism Week” at Mickipedia.

I have no idea how many times I’ve walked down Rio Grande Street in Austin without actually noticing the humor in a certain building adjaceny.

There is a pregnancy center right next door to a sorority. I wonder if they get discounts.