Dangling Conversations

Posted 28 Jan, 2005 at 00:44 by brent in /Chatter | Permanent link

Does anyone else feel that the statement "Don't work too hard" is an invitation to mediocrity (or less)? Or is it just me?

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Posted 23 Jan, 2005 at 11:18 by brent in /History | Permanent link

I just finished reading an interesting article in the February 2005 issue of Scientific American. The article describes the discovery of what could be a new species of the genus Homo on the island of Flores. Some interesting characteristics were similarities to H. Erectus, the diminutive height of 1 meter at adulthood, relatively advanced tools, and apparently existing as recently as 13000 years ago.

So I say "what could be" because there is still alot of research occurring as the discovery is relatively recent and there is also some controversy surrounding the discovery as it upsets some currently held beliefs about the dominance of, well, us. Furthermore the advanced tools they possessed seem to contradict the correspondingly small brains they had along with small bodies.

What came to mind as a potential reason why they might have been effective thinkers is in the process of diminuition they would probably have sloughed off less valuable portions of the brain and reorganized it so that other areas could have taken over increasing the number of connections to different areas resulting in higher associative power vs. raw processing power. Connections between disparate processing areas do seem to have interesting results according to Ramachandran (regarding synesthetes). They are working on examining the inside of the braincase to understand some surface characteristics of the brain. They are also working on seeing if they can recover some DNA for further examination.

They may be able to simulate the study though with say breeds of dogs that are similar but vary in size to understand how diminuition affects the restructuring of their brains and the corresponding intelligence of the animal, though it would probably be more relevant for a species that isn't domesticated.

Even more interesting is there is a possibility that similar finds may exist on islands nearby or in other locations where myths of diminutive people exist (as they did on Flores).

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Posted 19 Jan, 2005 at 10:27 by brent in /Chatter | Permanent link

I realized this morning how profound the human brain is; how your attitude toward something can dramatically alter how you invest yourself in it. This may seem academic at first but let me move forward with my story and you shall experience the subtlety of the human brain.

A couple of years ago Lisa's alarm clock was flaking out. Hitting more than one button at once would reset it. So we moved it to the guest bedroom (which didn't have one so it was an upgrade) and I gave her mine. I had flex time at work so I could really get up whenever anyway.

Over time the hour that I bothered to wake up started drifting north and my investment and satisfaction in work started drifting south. This was dramatically remedied by shifting positions in the evil empire to the coolest part of it, but I still wasn't really invested as I was before.

So Monday this week I bought myself an alarm clock for about $25. Has two alarms that can be set, digital tuner (but no seek) and a bunch of presets. Monday night I messed up the time and set it for PM instead of AM. But having fixed it yesterday for this morning, I'm finding myself much more awake and interested in what I'm doing.

Or it could be that it is sunny outside after multiple days of nasty rain...

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Posted 17 Jan, 2005 at 00:55 by brent in /Games | Permanent link

First I'd like chastise myself for having forgotten some basic courtesy. Welcome Mr. Blue to our cadre of danglers (at least I'm convinced we leave our readers dangling).

Still playing City of Heroes and have some snapshots of my character, Bitter Edge on the Virtue server. Oh, and the woman in black to the right is Agent Six. You can see a head bobbing in the water below, that's another hero I kicked into the water to get the shots :)

The pictures are 1600x1200 so about 400k each.

• The superhero looking gear with sparkes!
• My original darker look less the red glowing brightness
• My latest outfit acquired at 30 with the tendrils aura
• Same as above but with my typical toggle powers on

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Posted 16 Jan, 2005 at 01:08 by brent in /Chatter | Permanent link

Being a devout skeptic I had to try the humming having already tried the elbow thing so many years ago and knowing that attempting such feats of flexibility now would only fail catastrophically compared to just being amusing.

So I figured out you can make a noise briefly with a little breath control. When you hum, the air seems to typically go out the nose. So by blocking the nose if you want to make a sound it has to go somewhere else. So let your cheeks fill up. Of course it doesn't sound the same because it isn't resonating in your nasal passages. Have fun making camel mating sounds.

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Posted 06 Jan, 2005 at 09:35 by brent in /Math | Permanent link

I came up with what I think is a simple way to determine if a netmask is valid. If the netmask is represented as an unsigned 4 byte integer, let's call it nm, then if ((~nm) + 1) & (~nm) == 0 then nm is a valid netmask. Just to go in a bit of detail, a valid netmask is a set of 1's followed by a set of zeroes. so if a bit sequence of 01 appears in the netmask, the netmask is invalid.

So ~ is the bitwise complement, + is the standard integer add, and & is bitwise AND. So if the netmask is valid, ~ will flip the bits so it's a sequence of zeroes followed by a sequence of ones. Add one to that and you flip the bits again for all the ones to zeroes and the first zero to a one (or overflow the 4 bytes resulting in a zero value). If the netmask is valid, if you bitwise and that value now with the bitwise complement, you should now get zero.

If the netmask is invalid on the otherhand, then there is a 01 sequence somewhere. When you bit flip you get 10. When you add 1, that zero ensures the 1 is still there (no carry will get it to zero). So when you bitwise AND it with the bitwise complement, you will get 10 in that location which is certainly non-zero.

And it is currently snowing outside, so it looks like I'll have to wear shoes today (snow in sandals just doesn't work).

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Posted 05 Jan, 2005 at 09:55 by brent in /World | Permanent link

So I read this interesting (if you can say that) article in the paper yesterday. Made all the more significant by the rarity with which I read the paper. I realize that the information in the paper can be certainly flawed or misreported (like Chinese Whispers or simple human bias).

So for the sake of simplicity, I'll simply quote the article (acknowledging any spelling mistakes as my own):

See more ...

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Posted 04 Jan, 2005 at 23:48 by brent in /Games | Permanent link

Well, just wandered into CoH for kicks and was blown away by the all out war between the 5th Column and the Council in the streets. It seems be causing some server lag but damn, it's like continuous experience without having to move! The other cool little twist that I am somewhat fond of is the people wandering around will now randomly mention interesting things of people at least on the map if not in the area about various accomplishments certain online heroes have achieved. It's like having your own personal mob of bards singing your praises. Pretty sweet! They also rebalanced some powers and it doesn't seem to have affected my humble scrapper much at all (Virtue server, character name Bitter Edge).

Anyway, wanted to mention that. Also other cool game news is Jade Empire coming out near the end of March. W00t! Might have to take another week off for it as I did with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II.

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Posted 04 Jan, 2005 at 01:00 by brent in /World | Permanent link

One of the random thoughts that came to my mind is to apply a future cost to certain goods to represent their environmental impact against the best alternative. So for example if a wooden pencil had an environmental impact equivalent of say a dollar and an automatic one had an environmental impact equivalent of 50 cents, then the wooden pencil would have an extra 50 cents tacked on to represent the difference and would/should be used entirely to go towards remedying the impact it has on the environment.

You could also instead just apply the environmental impact equivalent instead of just the difference as well to ensure that the environment is maintained. Furthermore, companies could effectively reduce the cost of their goods to the consumer in a competitive manner by reducing the environmental impact and thereby reduce the additional charge that is passed on to the consumer.

The benefits that come to mind are that companies now have to have a rigorous environmental impact assessment to justify a reduction in a "standard" tax on their goods and the onus is now on the company instead of the government to pursue legal action should they fail to meet environmental standards. This could be a boon for getting money into the system applied to the environment. People wouldn't have to boycott since standard economic pressures will probably be much more effective to drive manufacturers to lower environmental cost.

It's an idea and I realize it has some flaws. Some examples are: Who determines the cost? Who manages the money--both collection and application? How does this work internationally?

Anyway, one of the ideas that has been jostling amongst my neurons.

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Posted 04 Jan, 2005 at 00:51 by brent in /World | Permanent link

I added this section as a nice clean place to separate out more world related commentary. Politics, religion, nature, etc fit nicely in here.

I'm adding a couple of posts myself but don't think I'm doing it to generate discussion with me :). I'm fundamentally lazy and if you don't mind waiting a couple of months to never for a response (unless you visit in person or phone) then feel free. It's more to throw some ideas out there on the web to get them out of my brain.

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Posted 04 Jan, 2005 at 00:35 by brent in /Math | Permanent link

Somebody shoot me. I did such a nice post for Matt then promptly overwrote it.

It went something like: Hey Matt! Just saw your post and did some digging on the web. As I recall (unreliably) I heard of wavelets being used for image and audio compression (lossy however) by dropping less significant terms and storing the rest.

Anyway, the sites of which I can now only dig up two of the four (though the other two sucked anyway since they were only book references):
www.wavelet.org -- includes digest and discussion forum
http://www.stardrive.org/math/Wavelets.htm -- has some visible math going on

Happy New Year to danglers and danglees. Also a belated Happy Seshmas (Seasonal Economic Stimulus Holiday). If you missed your opportunity, go out and shop. The economy will still thank you.

Not sure how many more posts I'll be able to do for a little while. Evil Empire action is kicking up and that means keep an eye on your molten cores.

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