mindlace

I hadn’t really thought about the fact that the talk Adam Kelsey and I gave was going to be uploaded onto archive.org. I was just reading an article in Nature by Cory Doctorow about the infrastructure archive.org uses, replicated on three continents, and designed for the Long Now (at least as close as one can get with racks in data centers, anywho), and it made me think of how this point in human history is like the short, hot time at the beginning from an informational perspective.

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.

I’ve decided that atoms are cryptonite and everything physical that I own diminishes my ability to use my super powers.

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.

It has been far too long since I posted about microbes on this blog. As a brief recap, prokaryotic microbes – bacteria and archaea – outnumber (and outweigh) all other forms of life on this planet by a wide margin. I have long held that those microbes living within the earth – either lithospheric or sedimentary – constitute the largest proportion of these microbes.  I’ve had this opinion since I first wrote a letter disputing the notion that plants were the predominant form of life to the SAT board (at around 16) when they had the temerity to mark me wrong for saying bacteria instead of plants (bacteria and archaea was not an option).

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.

Now I can blog from my phone. Still not one of the cool kids,though -I have no idea how to attach a photo.

OK, here’s your motivation. You’ve been chosen for a new reality show.

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?

These last two weeks have been challenging for me. I’ve had a bunch of stuff to get done at work that had some small, but critical pieces outside of my hands. At the same time, the technology / service stack I’m using is in heavy flux (like, major pieces are slated to land in the next week or two from this writing). Additionally, I have other responsibilities that tend to flop between idle and urgent.

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.

For my own edification and to facilitate the addition of UUIDs to Drupal, I have used SchemaSpy to create an overview of Drupal’s database schema as generated by today’s HEAD.

I have begun my quest to convert Drupal over to using UUIDs instead of IDs so that merging/branching drupal databases will be easier.

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.

OK I’m older now much older than I was when I was young. It’s been fun going around the sun. Hope to see you all here next time.