π/4, the Euler–Mascheroni constant, Chaitin's construction, the fraction of my internal narrative which consists of various rephrasings of I've been a contemptible fool; but, that's decision-theoretically irrelevant
Computing the Powerset
Suppose we want to find the powerset of a given set, that is, the set of all its subsets. How might we go about it? Well, the powerset of the empty set is the set containing the empty set.
And the powerset of the union of a set S with a set containing one element e, is just the union of the powerset of S with the set whose elements are like the members of the powerset of S except that they also contain e.
So in Clojure we might say
(require 'clojure.set)
(defn include-element [collection element]
(map (fn [set] (clojure.set/union set #{element}))
collection))
(defn powerset [set]
(if (empty? set)
#{#{}}
(let [subproblem (powerset (rest set))]
(clojure.set/union subproblem
(include-element subproblem
(first set))))))
An Unauthorized Use of Ms. Gunnison's Secret Time Machine
Gunni told her not to touch it;
Common sense would say as much in
Plainer words, for these devices
Warrant care if not a license,
Just to view the glowing screen
Of the forbidden time machine.
It's meant for research that's historical,
Not for making oneself an oracle,
Not for giving Voltaire a tease,
Or climbing up Pangaean trees.
Conversational Overhead
A woman of wisdom once told me to heed Paul Graham's advice to notice the things you can't say and then don't say them, which stance I'm updating slightly towards, because even when you're only making a perfectly reasonable point along the lines of Policy debates should not appear one-sided; I don't think that your Argument A actually supports Policy X (although I agree that X could be desireable for reasons independent of A) and everyone is charitable and no one bites, there's still a huge amount of emotional overhead incurred just by being in the conversation at all, because even when and you and your interlocutors are honest, you almost never have common knowledge of that honesty, so your interlocutors aren't necessarily sure that you're not just disagreeing with A out of secret enmity towards X, and you're not sure that they're sure that you're not, all of which drama is a drain on mental energy that could otherwise have been allocated to entirely grown-up concerns like JavaScript and money.
Quotations III
I am convinced, from many experiments, I could not study, to any degree of perfection, either mathematics, arithmetic, or algebra, without being a Deist, if not an Atheist.
—John Wesley
Selfishness and altruism are positively correlated within individuals, for the obvious reason.
Another Idle Wish for a Future Star Trek Series
a musical episode including a cover of the "strange new world" song from Equestria Girls
App Academy Diary, Week Nine
Sunday 17 November 2013— This was the last week of App Academy's regular course content; the next cohort starts Monday and my cohort will begin the three-week "post-course" mostly focused on interview practice, applying for jobs, &c. I got Superscription into a non-embarassing state: I made the feed-fetching happen as a scheduled task, added guest users, introduced the ability to mark entries as having been read, made an attractive click-and-drag category selector, &c. I still want to—at the very least—implement infinite-scroll pagination (fetching all the unread entries from the start can be very slow if there are a lot of them) and rewrite the category selector's terrible, terrible code. On Friday a lot of my class went to the San Francisco Startup Job Fair at noon, and we also had our demo day at the office at three. I think I made an okay showing? But thanks for reading.
You Can't Spell X Without Y
Why is it considered rude to reschedule an event after you've already sent out the invitations? Why do people stubbornly rejecting a compromise tend to do so in a polite and kindly manner? Why did you name your car Rainbow Dash? Speculative answers to these and other questions might be found in the following list of observations.
You can't spell alliteratively without literati.
You can't spell announcement without cement.
You can't spell apprenticeship without entice.
You can't spell chemotherapy without mother.
You can't spell eponymous without pony.
You can't spell compassion without compass.
You can't spell literate without iterate.
You can't spell disappointingly without tingly.
You can't spell disapproving without roving.
You can't spell disconcerting without sconce.
You can't spell discontinuance without nuance.
You can't spell ill-naturedness without redness.
You can't spell illustrative without strati.
You can't spell intransigently without gently.
You can't spell resolute without solute.
You can't spell oversuspicious without versus.
You can't spell precedent without recede.
You can't spell vindictive without indict.
World's Best
"We need some sort of slogan to go on our advertisements. Any ideas?"
"How about 'World's Best Widgets'?"
"Ha—no."
"Too cliché?"
"Not ambitious enough."
"Not ambitious enough?! How so?"
"Think about it! What use is it to have the best widget in today's world, if someone might just invent a better widget tomorrow? And who would be content to have the best widget in our universe, past, present, and future, when still better widgets might have existed if things had gone differently? No! I want all our potential customers to know that we make the best widgets in all possible worlds!"
Cascading Stable Strategies
App Academy Diary, Week Eight
Tuesday 5 Novembmer 2013— Yesterday was our last pair-programming project; I worked with Ben Watts on a little chat server in Node using WebSockets. I felt like perhaps there was something regrettable about shoving so much functionality into a big callback, but maybe that's just the nature of JavaScript, and not really regrettable at all? On Sunday I started my RSS-aggregator capstone project, now called Superscription.
Thursday 7 Novembmer 2013— I guess Superscription is going okay. Here's how it works. You can sign up and sign in and stuff. (I used Devise for this rather than rolling my own.) There are forms for adding a category or a subscription URL. When you add a URL, stuff happens which depends on stuff. More specifically, if you enter a URL which the system has never seen before, then a new Subscription model (which accepts_nested_attributes_for an associated UserSubscription join model) is created, and it requests the feed from the URL you supplied and tries to parse the XML using Nokogiri. If that doesn't work, it suggests that maybe you got the URL wrong, but if it does work, then it makes a bunch of Entry objects for all the stories in the feed, saves everything, and redirects you to your subscription index page. But if the system has already seen your URL before (presumably from another user with similar reading tastes), then it doesn't wastefully fetch all that data again: it just makes a new UserSubscription that points to you and your Category and the Subscription that it already has. It's efficient! Then when you click the "Read!" button (which is non-hideously positioned thanks to nearly an hour of fighting the CSS), all your news is organized by category under Bootstrap tabs. And on the subscription index page, when you click the little trash can next to a subscription, then it does the cool jQuery fade-out thing and sends an Ajax request telling the server to destroy that UserSubscription.
App Academy Diary, Week Seven
Monday 28 October 2013— The governor of Delaware was supposed to visit us today, but he totally stood us up!—supposedly because of a late airplane or something, if you even believe that. Today's assessment (on elementary JavaScript, binding of this, and the module pattern) was really straightforward, but I found the day's project (in collaboration with Irene Ngyuen) on client-side MVC quite challenging at times; I fear that we were only the second-best Irene–Zach team today. I'm sleeping over at the office again tonight, which seems like a good thing to do twice a week maybe?—when I stay, I can fit in some quality solo hacking time until sleep or distraction takes me, whereas I am not inclined to do so after a train and bike ride home. Case in point: I got a crude form of authentication working in Wires today! So many feels!
Wednesday 30 October 2013— Our focus this week is Backbone.js, a library for doing client-side stuff. I hadn't been sure what to do for my capstone project, but now (perhaps inspired by remembering how I really ought to use feeds instead of manually navigating to my favorite blogs for all the world as if it were 2003) I'm thinking of making an RSS reader and calling it Event Listener. In the evening, I made a small improvement to the Wires template engine, and I started working on an improvement to how objects inherit from the ORM base class, but it's getting late and I'm not done debugging and I wasn't planning on sleeping over tonight, so rather than pushing egregiously broken code to GitHub, I backed up my work as an online paste of a diff obtained by redirecting git stash show -p.
Levels
Specific is terrific,
But meta is betta.
App Academy Diary, Week Six
Tuesday 22 October 2013— I slept at the office last night for want of transportation, and ended up making some solid initial progress on a little Python web framework inspired by last week's class exercise, which I am also calling Wires. (Working on it in spare moments today alerted me to a disturbing deficit in my mental model of Python imports; you wouldn't expect organizing code into different directories to be difficult.) Yesterday I worked with Ryan Newton and today with Daphne Johnson on some JavaScript exercises.
Thursday 24 October 2013 (well, 0106 Friday)— Yesterday ("yesterday") I worked with Tommy Nast on a crude Asteroids clone using HTML canvas, and today ("today") I worked with Irene Zhou on a towers of Hanoi UI and started a Snake game using jQuery and DOM manipulation. I'm sleeping over at the office tonight, having spent the evening working on Wires.
Missing Words IV
You hear people accusing their enemies of being morally or intellectually bankrupt, and they mean it in the sense of "destitute of, or wholly lacking (something)", rather than the sense of financial insolvency. But I actually would like to see the insolvency metaphor: people should speak of declaring intellectual bankruptcy to mean "I was wrong before; I won't try to defend my previous claims because I can't" (in analogy to "I won't try to pay my debts, because I can't").
App Academy Diary, Week Five
Monday 14 October 2013— I'll confess that I didn't have a productive weekend at all. No excuses; I just got distracted. You could argue (I won't, but you can) that it's perfectly healthy and fine to take some well-earned relaxation on one's days off, but even relaxation is something that can be done better or worse: hours of the latest ephemeral internet amusements are probably much less rejuvenating than hours of ... I don't know, some sort of activity that doesn't involve sitting in front of a monitor?—I presume such things still exist even if I can't remember them anymore.
Still no deal in the BART contract talks; I took an evening train and slept at the office last night because we didn't know whether there would be trains in the morning. As it turns out, there were, but there likely won't be tomorrow. A moment of amusement is provided by imagining what kind of vicious and histrionic things a frustrated commuter might say if they were angry ("Curse the unions! Curse anyone who won't curse the unions! Curse anyone who won't put a light in their window and sit up all night cursing the unions! Let management fire them and hire scabs! Let hackers insert their names into the public sex-offender registry!" &c.), but in truth, I ain't even mad. (This is in accordance with policy; even if we were to suppose that I somehow knew how the labor dispute should ("should") be resolved, it would still be a waste of cognition to think about it unless we were also to suppose that people care what I think—and that's ridiculous.)
Today we did solo work on an application to keep track of musical artists and their associated albums and tracks, in the process gaining some more practice with authentication and learning about ActionMailer.
Tomorrow there's an assessment scheduled, and I really ought to have taken the time on the weekend to go through the posted practice-assessment, because I looked at it this evening, and somehow getting the specs to pass is much more difficult than I would have imagined. I may have a slight attitude problem: I tend to hold the entire idea of "studying for a test" in contempt (for surely we should study exactly the things that are worth knowing, tests merely being a instrumentally useful device for measuring what we have retained), but this is probably an error of modeling myself as having more agency than I actually have. All principles and rhetoric aside, we can predict that if I had studied for the test last week, then I wouldn't have forgotten the HAVING clause, but I didn't, so I did.
And that's terrible.
Speculative Etymology II
kind of disappointed that cog and cognition don't actually share a root
Serenity
"I shall seek the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
"I shall seek? What's wrong with the original God grant me?"
"What God sees fit to grant me is one of the things I can't change."
App Academy Diary, Week Four
Monday 7 October 2013— The main part of SedentaryRecord went pretty smoothly. I like my one-liner implementation of the has_many_through association better than the instructions' suggestion of writing a whole new query template; the TA Patrick pointed out that my version is inefficient (firing off two queries rather than one), but instead of writing the query-saving long version right away, I decided to try implementing validations first (one of the suggested extension ideas). That didn't go well at all; I spent a lot of time ineffectually hacking away at the problem but didn't even come up with anything worth committing!
Wednesday 9 October 2013— I did poorly on the assessment yesterday. There were eight SQL queries to write; the first five were trivial, but I bombed the last three because I'm a moron and didn't remember that the keyword for filtering aggregations was HAVING. I worked with William Ott on an ice-cream finder (which uses Google Maps APIs to print out directions to nearby ice-cream) and a Twitter client. Of course, it simply wouldn't do to write an ice-cream finder without using it to find ice-cream, so after class we took one of our program's suggestions and bought ice-cream at the Häagen-Dazs in the mall on Market and Fifth. Today I worked with David A.; we learned about routers and controllers.
App Academy Diary, Week Three
Monday 30 September 2013— Today's assessment was implementing Crazy Eights in accordance with the given RSpec tests. In the afternoon, I worked with Dan Quan on exercises from the SQL Zoo, which varied wildly in difficulty.
Tuesday 1 October 2013— Today I worked with A. J. Gregory again, this time on a cute Ruby program for interacting with a database. A few remarks follow. The first remark: I much prefer the %Q syntax for multiline strings over heredocs. The second remark: it turns out that using string interpolation to compose database queries is very bad, because it leaves you vulnerable to SQL-injection attacks. The third, and final, remark: you shouldn't name any of your Ruby classes "Data," because apparently this name is already used by a regrettably exposed implementation detail of the interpreter itself.