Neitzche and Turing

From the Prologue of Beyond Good and Evil: "the fundamental condition of all life, perspective."

From the Turing machine: all it sees is its current state and immediate environment. This is perspective. The individual actor, whether an ant or a person in an economy or an agent in a simulation - it sees only its environment, and its own (possibly very complex) internal state. Perspective.

It is these tiny pieces each with their own perspective that come together to create order within a system of increasing entropy, to create life. See? Perspective is the fundamental condition of life.

Reading about complexity theory bangs my drum.

thoughts on the turing machine

A simple Turing machine, in each step, takes as input its own state and the state of its environment. Output is its next state, how to change the environment, and how to move to a different environment.

Or: the input to a Turing machine is the tape and its starting position. The output of the turing machine is the tape when it's done.

We can look at the Turing machine at these two levels as input->output. The aggregate input-output is easier to see. The each-step input-output explains how it works.

When we're looking at biological computation, do we ever get to see the individual steps? We're lucky to get a view of the aggregate input/output. How do you debug a cell?

renewal

my motto today: Keep feeling new things.

Not keep feeling the same things. There is no continuation of feelings. There can be renewal, but feelings do not hold still.
I don't stay in love with my husband. I love him every day so far, but each day it is a new love, a different love. I am a different person, he is a different person. The more I can see him as he is today, the more I can love him with an accurate love.

There is no stability in emotions. Emotions are fleeting. We can feel love again and again, but it is a changing, growing process. Never stable.

Software is like this too. Some people like to think we write an application and it is done. It can serve the users' needs for years to come. It doesn't work like that - when development ceases on an application, when we stop updating and improving the UI and refactoring the code, that app becomes stale and hateful. The users' needs change, their expectations rise, and the hatred of PeopleSoft grows in their hearts. Meanwhile the code becomes legacy, residing in no developer's head, losing readability as software engineering standards advance.

So it is with feelings. We have Love 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1, 2.0...
Feelings never stay the same. That's like asking a favorite swimming hole to keep the same water in it. We are constantly under development. Keep feeling new things.

Movie Lit: Moonrise Kingdom

Spoilers. Watch the movie and then comment.

The movie had themes of:
* the importance of connection
* competing authorities: the scouts (military), the police, social services ("the state"), and above all of them: the law. Parental and church authority put in an appearance too, although law and parental are conflated because the parents are lawyers.
* scale. Objects in the visuals often appear to be larger than they are until a person approaches them. The obstacles to connection feel larger than they are until they're confronted.

Some other themes:
* leadership - Scoutmaster Ward shows that people follow leadership; the nominal authority from a patch doesn't matter compared to actions under crisis.
* marriage - we enter it so early, when we feel the magic of that first strong connection. Later that decision makes no sense. Connection is essential; responsibility is not enough. No one connection is forever.
* expectations - considering Suzy a problem child makes her more of one. People don't like Sam because "no one else does."
* following - the scouts are all against Sam until the bad one is eliminated, and then they're all for him as soon as the next leader emerges in Sam's favor.

At first, all kinds of authority (church, parental, police, the state, scouts) conspire to keep Sam and Suzy apart. But when Sam and Suzy are ready to hurl their very lives against these obstacles, suddenly the authority figures are humans - they combine their authorities (police, the state, legal) and overcome the obstacles in the system.
This leads the protagonists to agree to live under authority (parental and police, respectively). because they are no longer denied the connection that is so important.

Sam and Suzy build a world together with their connection. When God (the narrator) and nature (the storm) conspire with earthly authorities to wipe out that world, they do not succeed. It lives on inside them. That momentary world is forever, that connection stretches sideways in time.

Next adventure

I started Jeet Kune Do today.
Last Monday was a trial class.
This morning I read about the art on Wikipedia.
Today's class, my second, taught more new concepts than I can absorb in one hour. Yet -

I started Jeet Kune Do after today's class ended, sitting in quiet a passageway in the shopping center.
Do I have time for something new in my life? No. Am I going to welcome it anyway? Yes. I asked the universe for more, and this opportunity arrived. It was by association that I chose to attend this class, not deliberate selection. Only this morning (reading on Wikipedia) did I learn anything about its philosophy.

 I hope to free my followers from clinging to styles, patterns, or molds.

Be like water

truth exists outside all molds; pattern and awareness is never exclusive. Again let me remind you Jeet Kune Do is just a name used, a boat to get one across, and once across it is to be discarded and not to be carried on one's back.

This resonates with me. JKD aims to remove unnecessary movements, rather than add its own forms. It stresses reacting to the problem in front of you, not following formulas. This is how I strive to code, and live, and it is how I will learn to move.

 

 

Pipes

My friend had a vision, in which he was running around a bioler room trying to keep it from exploding. There were all these pipes, steam pipes, and each need to be depressurized by pressing a valve. He kept running back and forth from pipe to pipe, releasing pressure from the one closest to explosion, reaching for others and running faster, faster trying to keep them all under control.
The pipes represented the different needs in his life, his needs and the needs of those who depend on him. Work, music, kids, wife. Family, personal growth, career ambitions, sex, friendships. He couldn't keep them all happy and the pressure was building.

Then the Epiphany. The solution is not to abandon parts of his life that are important to him. Nor is it to run faster and faster, push himself harder until he collapses. The solution is to bring the pipes closer together.

Activities that release pressure from multiple pipes are the goal. Work that is intellectualy stimulating and career building, on a team of people who are friends, who can discuss music and life. Friends who share many interests, with whom you can work, from whom you can learn, and even have sex. Romantic and intellectual and emotional and sexual stimulation with the same person, who also plays with your kids? Priceless.

i look for people and opportunities that let me bring the pipes closer together. I love learning, meeting new people, speaking, drinking beer. User groups give me all this plus career advancement. Friends who let off steam from multiple pipes get more of my time. If he has kids in elementary school, then we can talk shop while our kids entertain each other. Playing tag is both exercise and high-value bonding time. This strategy lets me accept more richness into my life.

Girl programmers

There are not enough girl programmers.
We keep running around blaming programmers for this ("hostile work environment!") when maybe we should also blame... girls.

Female peer pressure is one reason girls don't go into coding. Programming (and math and hard sciences) are not valued in the female community. Women who want to be accepted by other women aren't going to choose a field most women don't understand.

This idea applies to other underrepresented minorities too.

Creating a female-friendly work environment is necessary but not sufficient to getting more women into the programming workplace. We also need to work on the larger environment among females.

"Geek" has long since moved from insult to tribal identifier. Can we achieve the same critical mass of female geeks?

Greatness and User Groups

"At the heart of it is the idea that the only person responsible for and capable of securing my own happiness and fulfillment in life, is me. [Ayn Rand] taught me to look at the world as an active agent, not a passive observer; to realize that, while there are many things beyond my control in life, I can still use my mind and my life to be productive, positive, and great in the things that I do. And not only that, I learned to look at other people that way too. That's one reason I started the ALT.NET group -- because I believe that there is greatness in people, and those are the people I want to be around. Another thing her books emphasize is that people are "traders" -- that we give and take, in both material and non-material ways, and this trading is what allows many individuals to act in concert as a society. Its easy to understand this in terms of physical things -- I trade my labor for a paycheck, for example. But we also trade in emotions, encouragement, knowledge, etc. Because Rand views people as heroic, and capable of greatness, she emphasized that when you trade "value for value" with someone, you should always trade your best for their best, realizing that by doing so, you have increased the sheer amount of AWESOME in the world. This is the honest way of living."

@nicholascloud

Women and math

In Brain Rules, John Medina talks about differences in male and female brains. Two of the differences he mentioned are relevant to women in technology. As presented here, these are total generalizations, just food for thought.

In school, girls are better at verbal skills. In mixed-gender classrooms, girls speak up more often when verbal topics are studied. The discussion can work well with the girls' cooperative communication style. Boys are behind in elementary school at verbal tasks.

Then in math and science, boys and girls have equal aptitudes. In a topic where there is pretty much one right answer, the boys' competitive communication style dominates. While the boys try to outdo one another, the girls are intimidated into silence. The girls can do it perfectly well, but when the boys turn the classroom into a competition, the girls withdraw.

Those trends may be the beginning of some of the disparities we see in career choices.

Next, there are the genetic differences between boys and girls. One generalization we can't argue with: boys have one X chromosome, and girls two. Many of the genes on the X chromosome affect brain function. In each cell, only one X chromosome is needed, and the other is deactivated. Boys, they're all the same. Girls,determined each cell randomly turns one off. This means girls are sorta the average of two X chromosomes, while boys are defined by one. Maybe this is part of why there are more men at the extremes of intelligence: men are more likely to be retarded, and more likely to be freakishly intelligent.