There will come a time, not long from now, that the notion that one would ever “lose” data is like the notion that one could misplace one’s ear, or more gentle parts; just not even considered, because everything naturally persists in multilayered, adaptive caches that cause all data to be conserved like the data at archive.org.

So I’m getting rid of everything I own. I’ve ditched a bunch of electronics, I’m donating my books to the library, and I have some folks lined up to take my tools.

I’m also looking into a uniform rental place to deliver clean clothes to me every day and take away my dirties, so I don’t have to own clothing. Mad props to Tess for coming up with that idea. Once I can rent clothes I will donate all my clothes save possibly undergarments to goodwill. 

At the moment I appear to be the proud owner of a car worth slightly less than what is owed. So I will live in that for a while. It has plenty of room for me to sleep fully stretched out.

The one limiting factor is that while atoms are cryptonite, bits are spinach; the more bandwidth I have the more powerful I become (mwah hah hah).

So I must have the most bandwidth I can afford. Right now my plan is to wire a facility near a datacenter with gigabit bandwidth and put up a really phat wireless lan. Don’t know if I can afford it but I have been spending an extraordinary amount on renting an apartment here.

For a long time, this has been in dispute by wiser minds than those assembling SAT tests, but for the most part the question has remained unresolved due to a lack of data. Prokaryotes are nearly invisible to most forms of microscopy, and so systemic reviews of frequency have had to wait for modern rapid gene sequencing and other techniques to arrive.

Research in the 21st August issue of Nature has shed some light on the matter. They were studying microbes that live in deep-sea sediments: microbes that live not on the ocean floor but underneath it, using a drilling vessel that had been repurposed from its original mission of finding more oil.

Data from this paper suggests that there are on the order of a million cells in every cubic centimeter of sediment 500m beneath the sea floor, or more than 50% of all microbial cells on earth. Additionally, the predominant form of these organisms is Archaea.

Now, I’ve already speculated that Archaea pre-dates bacteria and that the nucleus represents a primordial parasitism of an Archaea upon bacterial colonies (many bacteria, despite not being “multi-cellular”, live in aggregates that are, in fact, surrounded by another membrane.) I also believe in xenogenesis; that is, I believe life came to Earth from elsewhere, most likely Mars. Looking through my archives I don’t seem to have come out on this aspect publicly before, but my train of logic is simple:

1. Mars attained the temperatures and pressures needed, particularly surface temperatures around the triple point of water, when Earth was still a sterile molten cauldron. There’s abundant evidence that mars had surface water in its early history.
2. Our best fossil evidence suggests that microbial life arose on Earth practically as soon as the Earth was cool enough to allow liquid water to exist. While the measurement at these deep time distances is subject to wide margin of error, the margin of error is on the order of several million years, which is too short for most known abiotic processes to result in life.
3. Earth was under continual bombardment by fragments of Mars during this time.
4. Therefore, life came from Mars.

More specifically, I think Archaea came from Mars, and that bacteria are the “native’s” way of doing things.

Anyway, the fact that the pervasive form of life in subsea sediments are Archaea leads me to think that my hypotheses still holds.  There’s another issue of Nature that I haven’t quite gotten to yet that has more information about the biotic processes that allow life to continue down there, so watch this space for more microbial meanderings.

You’ve been taken to infinimart, where they have literally everything available for retail sale on the planet.

The check-out lane says you can have 12 items or fewer, and those are the only physical items you can own for the next year. Otherwise your life is as normal, and at the end of the show you get to keep whatever it was you picked to spend the year with.

For purposes of this checkout, you can have a “bulk pack” or a “set” containing up to 24 copies or pieces.

I would have:

• 1 portable computing device
• 1 portable communication device
• 1 vehicle
• 1 12 piece global knife set
• 1 wok
• 1 bowl
• 1 pair chopsticks
• 1 24-piece set of jumpsuits
• 1 pair shoes
• 1 12 pair sock set
• 1 12 pair underwear set

This data suggests that if I could go naked all the time I could save 25% more stuff for things like, oh, a private jet. Or, if I stopped preparing food, I could have 1/3% more stuff.

Pragmatically, there are too many tools missing from that set for me to live that way; I’d also need a shikifuton for sleep and all the materials needed to clean and maintain the other stuff.

What would you grab from infinimart on the way out?

In the first week, I failed to manage the external bits to a place where they could be used by me. Additionally, some of my other responsibilities came up, and I spent a little more time on some voluntary tasks than maybe I should’ve. This meant that most of the last two weeks worth of work was still pending by the time this week started.

This would have been mostly OK except other team members had stuff they were going to do based on my stuff, and so I ended up being an external-bit-that-ain’t-set for them, as well. That really bothers me.

I think I need to get more mentally flexible. The pattern I seem to be in is: I come up with a plan and when pieces of it aren’t available I just wait. Sometimes that’s OK, and is even the right choice, but for the most part I need to just step back, think “OK, what’s the nearest approximation I can accomplish now”, do that bit, and re-visit when things are more opportune.

This is hard for me. Part of it is that I have to do things that are below my quality standards, or don’t meet the actual target. I am a bit more of a perfectionist than I should be, I guess.

But the other part is that I have a mental map of what I’m going to do based on what was planned, and when pieces aren’t there I don’t know how to proceed. Typing this out, I think what I need to do is “sort by externalities” - that is, I need to take the parts that depend on NotMe and push them to the end of my plan, or list in advance what I’m going to do if the externalities don’t materialize.

I also had one of my all-too-frequent gaps in my psychopharm meds at the beginning of the month, which (when combined with some of this pressure) lead to strong feelings of anxiety and … well, it’s hard to describe, but I’d call it the emotional component of what people are talking about when they say they feel worthless.

I don’t, in fact, think I’m worthless, and I know I don’t have much to feel anxious about. I’ve been around the bend with these meds enough that this is basically like ‘engine knocking’ - it’s a symptom of not being settled into a dosage pattern.

I was also alone for most of this period, as my sweetie has gone off to teach art in the hills somewhere, which made it harder for those emotional loops to terminate.

All in all, I don’t think I want to have this experience again; I need to put more effort into giving ritual obeisance to the DEA’s petty rules.

Anyway, that’s the life update for the nonce. More content-ish stuff soon, I assure you.

The first thing to figure out is how best to generate UUIDs in PHP. The naive pure-php approaches that use rand() have quickly proven to be non-viable (generating 10 of them hasn’t completed after several minutes), at least on my test virtual machine, presumably on account of running out of randomness.

The OSSP UUID module for PHP5 is much better, generating 60k “type 4” (completely random) uuids per second. However, the memory usage grows the more UUIDs you generate, so that could be an issue. So despite the fact that this module implies a C module that has to be available to PHP, I’m going to use it.

I will try to keep my implementation open to creating UUIDs in the DB, as PostgreSQL uses the same library to create UUIDs, so no sense in reinventing the wheel. MySQL UUIDs are broken in any sort of replicated environment (in that you can get the same UUID repeatedly from a given SELECT UUID();) so I must have a language-level version available.

So now that I’ve elected to settle on the OSSP UUID module, I can take the next steps towards making it work in Drupal.

If you want to get me something material I have an amazon wishlist that is pretty well-sorted, and I just deleted all the stuff off of it I’ve already bought.

I am also, of course, interested in surprises. Thanks for caring about my birthday!

• Humans can live at up to 60bar for at least a week; presumably, if you didn’t need to decompress them, they could live much longer.
• Pressurizing quickly without changing the percentage oxygen is a recipe for dizziness, convulsion, and death.
• Long term exposure to high pressure can cause bone death. Not clear whether this is on account of the lower % oxygen necessary or on account of the subjects being de/repressurized.
• The clouds in a gas giant are quite possibly much akin to the atmosphere above 18th century london; full of soot, tarry particles, and metallized hydrocarbons. This is apparently on account of convection, precipitation, and evaporation, and ofc works better the hotter the gas giant.
• Deeper layers (and potentially different bands) would see the precipitation of some pretty spiffy molecules, including diamond, apparently; good reason to risk your life “diving”.
• While I have yet to find a really good excuse for a layer or band of CO2 enriched atmosphere, were there to be one, it could be much akin to venus’ atmosphere, including the sulfuric acid clouds. Soot filled sulfuric acid clouds sounds lovely, doesn’t it?
• Looking into diving bells, I realized that if the colony ship was a big (think km in diameter) concave bell-shape (used to catch the light from solar-system based lasers until the Bussard ramjet can take over) then when the ship has to “land” in the the gas giant, it can serve as a giant diving bell containing enough O2 enriched atmosphere for a small city. Since the rocket nozzle would have to withstand hydrogen plasma accelerated to nearly the speed of light, it would be robust against at least a few bar of pressure.
• Since victorian tech is not too good with the whole membrane thing, the kind of Scuba-style apparatus you’d need to hang out outside is kind of off-limits. If I posit some sort of mutualist parasite that provides O2 in exchange for nutrients, then I have an easy way of differentiating the “working class” from the elites who get to live in a controlled atmosphere their whole lives - it makes the infected literally “outsiders”.

Vacation was nice - I learned a lot about a relationship that is important to me as well as learning a good deal about the kind of opportunities available in the SF Bay Area and my relative fitness thereto. There’s a couple of pending things in that area; more news when I have it.

The aforementioned consulting work is pretty awesome- it’s basically a project I’ve wanted to build myself, but someone else is paying me (sadly, this means that most of it is work-for-hire).

Because I lost a week of billed work in addition to the week I lost from being on vacation, I’m in a bit of scramble-mode to catch up with the bills. So if I’m terse or distracted for the next two weeks, just remember, it’s not you, it’s my creditors.

I’ve switched over to using google (via google apps) for my email, so I should be less of a sketchy mofo when communicating with me via email now that I don’t have to deal with 10k spam every day.

Still have to get around to updating this blog to 2.5 - I think I’m going to cross-grade to some hosted thingy at that time. I already tried crossgrading to wordpress.com but they require that they be the MX for whichever domain you point at them- which means either this thing moves to e.g. log.mindlace.net or I find another provider.

I’m building a cluster now, where all the machines have only private interfaces save one; obviously, I’d like the internal machines to be able to do their own updating, etc.

So I need to put in some sort of NAT. The problem is, iptables doesn’t recognize virtual interfaces, so you can’t NAT using the source/dest interface as your trigger. So here, then, is the simplest way I’ve found to set up SNAT on a virtual interface, assuming all your IP addresses are on eth0 and you are using a 10 network (in the example, 10.23.0.x) as your internal network:


cat 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables --table nat --append POSTROUTING -d !10.23.0.0/24 -j MASQUERADE


Among other pithy observations, she points out that having children is irrational, and that the magic feeling of having a child is really just the serotonin (though, to be fair, she probably should’ve said oxytocin).

Unfortunately, like all American moving pictures, sentimentality must win in the end, and this episode is no exception; it ends with an “aww, wouldn’t it be nice to have a kid” moment.

I’m also reading Our Inner Ape (which is much, much better than Primates and Philosophers). Dr. de Wall points out that whomever can’t get it up to pass on their genes, regardless of the cost, doesn’t make it into the next generation, thus leading to the present it-costs-more-than-it’s-worth scenario.

The thing for me, though, is that I’ve already got the feeling that I’ve jumped the shark; from little things like being cranky that kids these days can’t seem to spell worth a damn to the pervasive sensation that my body has started its long slide into senescence… if this were a game I’d’ve hit the reset button long ago.

Now, I’m not complaining, mind you; by just about any measure, I live one of the most privileged lives this miserable ball of rock has to offer.

Mostly it’s that I’m just recently climbing out of some problems that have dogged me for as long as I can remember, and I can’t help but wonder what it would’ve been like if I could’ve gotten over some of this nonsense earlier, or if I would’ve even had these problems had I grown up in a more enlightened environment.

For me, that’s one of the big things that makes the apparent negative ROI of reproducing worthwhile: not to live vicariously through my children, but simply to give someone the opportunity to grow up in an environment of respect and care for their emotional and intellectual well-being.

I’m settling into life version 3.x, and while it’s clearly still a development branch it holds promise. My apartment is (still) a wreck but I guess I’ll get that taken care of in the next few days, which means I should finally be able to start having people over for dinner and BRAINS.

Still working like a fiend, partially because there’s a lot of work and partially because I’m trying to shovel myself out from under a mountain of debt. I’m enjoying it, though, and it’s all crap that will look nice on a resume the next time I’m pimping myself out.

the data delivered between 2003 and 2006 by the NASA satellite WMAP, which produced a full-sky, high resolution map of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB), yield a very poor fit to the concordance model at large angular scales. They rather tend to favour a finite, positively curved space, and provide hints about a multiply-connected topology. [full story]  

The work itself is hard to articulate in less than a few thousand words, but a simplistic take on it is that I want to make a game.

In order to make myself focus on work, I ditched my MacBook Pro for a MacBook. Having no 3d capability to speak of, it eliminated the temptation to write games when I should’ve been working.

Yesterday I finally got myself a new machine that does have dedicated 3D; the 24” iMac. For a thousand dollars less than the Mac Pro, it has enough graphics oomph to give me the graphic fidelity I need; I’m no super 3d artist or anything so most of the visual effects of the game will have to wait until I can con an artist into working with me.

I’m fairly happy with it. Firstly, the keyboard is a thing of beauty. It’s basically a refined version of the keyboard on the MacBook with slightly more spacious function keys and a full number pad. It’s commentary of some sort that a number pad makes me so happy.

I was this >< close to getting the 20” iMac, but I have also developed something of a sweet tooth for TV on iTunes, and, well… the 24” is juust bigger enough to be substantially more compelling when viewing at about six feet.

I’ve yet to figure out whether the built-in speakers will suffice for most of my video watching, but the screen will certainly suffice.

Even the Mighty Mouse is not as apocalyptically awful as I thought it would be. The ball, which felt horribly sloppy to me when I first used it, turns out to be very responsive to your movements, which almost makes it tolerable. The one thing that bugs me is that the right mouse button doesn’t seem to work if the left button is being touched at all, which is definitely requiring me to change my finger-wiggling habits.

Mac OS Leopard is also pretty durn spiffy; I haven’t used much of it yet, but the new look is a welcome change and the improvements to Mail.app quite welcome.

I also bought an upgrade to Unity, the 3D game environment I’m coding in, and I really look forward to diving into that - just as soon as the firm I’m consulting in association with gets around to getting me a machine like they said they would, so I can take this bad boy home.

Remind me never to stick essential services in a virtual environment without extensive testing for load-based failure modes.

At any rate, mail will be back up in a few hours, I hope. 

In short, if you want your kids to value helping others in a variety of ways, this research suggests that you’re likely to be effective when you actively encourage those behaviors through conversation, experiential learning, and other actions